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Name (Rebecca Ryan) centre number (55381) and candidate number (0045) on EVERY piece of work!

A2 Coursework -My Paperwork from Google Documents

Link to Initial Proposal for A2 Coursework (Summer Project)
Link to research for Film Trailer, Poster, Website Homepage and Radio Advertisment (Summer Project)
Link to Research for Film Websites (Summer Project) -I tried to link to my own work but the File was too big, so linked straight to Official Website instead:
-Website Homepage
-Synopsis
-Cast & Crew
-Photos
Link to Brief
Link to Initial ideas
Link to fully realised proposal for A2 Coursework. -Subject of my Campaign and Synopsis
Link to Trailer -Script and Screenplay
Link to 'Castle Cove'. -General information on the proposal for our film

Also include:
Proposal
Treatment
Synopsis
Research Notes
Ideas Blasts
SWOT Analysis
Target Anudience Information
Textual Analyses of existing media campaigns
Draft Layouts

Script (Film Teaser Trialer)
Script (Radio advertisment)
Layout (Web page)
Layout (Magazine cover)

My magazine front cover

The task was to design an alternate magazine cover for an existing, well know magazine. We were given a choice of four images of four very different looking women and given a variety of different magazines, each covering different subjects and from very alternative ends of the audience spectrum. These magazines included: Dazed & Confused, Cosmopolitan, FHM, Sight & Sound, Woman & Home and Star. I decided that I wanted to create an alternate cover for Dazed & Confused magazine, a magazine that I was aware of and purchased myself occasionally. I had to choose one of the four women as the central feature for my cover, and looking through the models there were one or two that fit the Dazed & Confused style and met its codes and conventions, and some that steered so far away from what is related to the magazine. The image of the woman I used on my magazine cover was the one out of the four that I found most appropriate to use and fitted the style Dazed & Confused is associated with. The model has a natural, effortless beauty, she looks like the kind of person that is bored by their own appearance and doesn’t care for it. She doesn’t look like she is wearing much, if any make-up and her hair is tossed and messy and the clothes she is wearing are casual and simple. Her general appearance is unkempt and care-free; she draws the viewer in as they wonder why she is so seemingly uninterested in her appearance as the modern world obsessively is. This way of thinking, of expressing yourself to oneself and to others, reminds me hugely of Anne Cronin’s theory of ‘Compulsory Individuality’. The desire to be truly individual, to be like no one else, is constructed and strived to be, to the point where you are actually taken further away from truly being an individual, from truly, really being yourself.
The Dazed & Confused magazine covers consistently follow the same simplistic layout. Apart from the focal image of a particular celebrity, icon or model, there is usually just the title of the publication and some other text listing important features in the issue, as well as the date and barcode, where as other magazine covers are packed with images, articles, stories and information. Therefore I did not have a huge amount of work to do for the cover. Dazed & Confused use a very specific typeface on their covers that suits their style well; it is simple and understated, leaving the words instead of the font to do the talking. I wanted to recreate the magazine cover as closely as I could and make it as realistic as possible, I therefore needed a typeface that resembled the trademark Dazed & Confused one. The font that I found was called Impact (Roman) and had a very close resemblance to the original. It was a very big and bold san-serif typeface, simple and straight to the point. I added the ‘Dazed’ as one piece of text reading horizontally and then ‘& Confused’ as a separate, much smaller piece that read vertically. The length of the ‘& Confused’ also had to fit the length of the last letter of ‘Dazed’ in true Dazed & Confused style. The image of the young woman I had chosen was in black and white, and this had given me the idea of giving the issue a black and white theme. Because of this I coloured the font white, making the text stand out against the background much better than colouring it black would have done. I also decided to add a sub-title underneath the main title Dazed & Confused that referred to the theme of that issue of the magazine; ‘The Monochrome Issue’. As they were both titles I used the same typeface for the sub-title as I had for the title.
When this was done I needed to work on the other text that featured on the cover; the articles and stories that had predominate importance in the issue and that were most likely to attract Dazed consumers. To do this I researched other Dazed & Confused magazine covers in Google search engine and compared what occurred on these covers most frequently. On a lot of the covers featured a 'Face to Face' feature, which were interviews with certain celebrities, icons, public figures, people of importance, etc. I therefore did my own version of this 'Face to Face' feature, including a wide variety of different talents that I thought would be included in Dazed & Confused magazines and attract their readership. These stars included: actor Sean Penn, model Daisy Lowe, artist Damien Hirst and indie-folk musician Aaron Weiss and rap musician Dizzie Rascal. Below this feature I did another that I found was featured reguarly on Dazed covers; the Plus feature, which noted everything else important in the magazine. For these features I changed the typeface of the text to MattAntique BT, a slightly more fancy and interesting font than the title and sub title had been in. I did this because I wanted the cover to look slightly more varied and interesting and also because I wanted to visually separate the title from the rest of the text on the cover. The font size was small, yet still readable from a distance and I made sure to make the titles of the features (‘Face to Face’ and ‘Plus’) slightly bigger.
More important than any of this text however, is the feature that links to the image of the celebrity or figure that is the focal point and main feature of the entire cover. I used a western themed typeface on the individuals name because in my opinion she is dresses quite western-esq (considering the denim looking waist coat/shirt). The rest of the text was in the same style as the other features. I made the subject of the text about something that I knew would interest the Dazed & Confused readership. Rather than making it about something to do with appearance or clothes or something generally materialist, I chose to write about something culturally/spiritually themed, because I knew the consumers would approve of that.

Further development of my creativity...

Since writing my previous blog; how my creativity has developed through use of digital technologies to complete my coursework productions, my development using digital technologies has continued and even grown after the last few weeks. Apart from using, and becoming familiar with Adobe Photoshop (a programme I had used before but not in Media lessons) I have used a programme that was completely new to me –Macromedia Dream Weaver, where we learnt how to broadcast the webpage’s we had made in Photoshop, live on the Internet. Apart from being set tasks in lesson time to use in these various workshops, I have also been introduced to something I have never done before, blogging, and which I have to admit, am becoming increasingly fond of. For the coursework in our previous AS year I had the idea to record every idea or progression the group had in a small handy notebook, like a journal we could make a note in, no matter how small or insignificant and record and reference back to. However with the introduction of Blogger, I am still able to keep track of ideas and progress, however interactively -all I have to do is log on and type away!

Using Photoshop -Creating a Film Poster and Website Homepage

Although I am an art student myself –Graphic Design to be precise- I am not hugely comfortable with Adobe Photoshop and tend to do my best to stay away from it. When it came to being re-introduced recently, as preparation for my A2 Coursework, I found that it was still a struggle to get to grips with the programme. We were given three images to work with; a landscape of a desert, a cartoon character and a car, and asked to edit the latter of the two onto the desert background, editing and adjusting the images as we progressed. We were also asked to add text, a title and subtitle or tagline; the foundations for a movie poster.
The following lesson we were asked to put together a webpage on Photoshop and then adjust it to make it interactive, so that when the mouse was moved over one of the elements, such as a character on the webpage, it would disappear. These are the instructions we followed: [Photoshop] File; Save for web; Save. By doing this it would mean that the screen shown would be saved separately. Using Photoshop was only half of the task however, for the second part we were asked to use Macromedia Dream Weaver, a programme that I had never used before. This was the programme that would allow us to broadcast our webpage’s live on the internet. The programme was quite complicated and we had to follow all the steps accurately to get it right. Instructions as follows: [Macromedia Dream Weaver] Create new HTML page; Untitled 1 – design; Manage sites (in Files; New; Site definition; [name site]; Next; No to server technology; Edit local copies; [store files]; None; Summery; Done.

How my creativity has developed through use of digital technologies to complete my coursework productions

Throughout the process of our AS Media Studies coursework, from pre-production; during the earlier paper work stages of our preliminary and main films, which I kept a record of in a journal and scanned onto the computer at the end of the tasks, to the production; putting our fully realised thoughts and ideas into physical action using film production equipment such as Digital Video cameras and microphones, until the final stages of productions such as editing; for which we used Windows Movie Maker, and evaluating; which we displayed interactively on YouTube under our final main film. Throughout all of these stages digital technology featured frequently, even when we thought it would not be necessary or needed, for instance the initial, planning stages of the productions. It is often thought, by myself included, then when the use of digital technology is mentioned in film making, it is referring to the actual, physical act of film making rather than any other stage, or at least that is what first comes to mind. However digital technologies are used through the entire process of film making. Obviously digital technology is a vital part of film making, and when it came to physically shooting the films and putting our plans into action, something that we could not have managed to make the films without.

During the initial stages of the tasks, the planning and pre-production stages, the work we did was very much paper based. We had been told to keep a folder with all of this work in, I, however, had the idea to keep a journal, compiling all the work into one book. Every single idea or thought, no matter how unimportant it may turn out to be, all in one book. At the end of the project I would scan the pages of the book into the computer and then print them out to go into a folder, so that they were better formatted and easier to read. This idea turned out very useful and I did the same for the following final task. The only other use of digital technology at this stage involved using the internet. I used Moodle to print off sheets that our lecturer had put onto the Weymouth College site and would help us with the coursework and other sites to research and help me. I used the search engine Google when researching the film genre and style we had chosen, or if we were representing certain characters or stereotypes. For example in the preliminary task we represented cops and criminals, and in the main task the upper social class and burglars. Burglars in particular was a very useful character to research as the results came up with the stereotype of what is widely though a burglar looks like: dress in dark clothes from head to toe, wearing a beanie hat and gloves to avoid leaving finger prints, face partly or entirely covered so as to avoid being recognised, accompanied by the trademark burglars tools; the crow bar and a flash light (as well as the optional £/$ sign sack slung over the shoulder). Apart from the use of digital technology in these initial stages however, we drew upon our own knowledge to be creative with our coursework.

The physical making of the film however, was where the majority of my creativity involving digital technology was developed. I was allowed to use film making equipment and technology properly for the very first time and applying them in a focused and professional way. During this time we used Digital Video cameras to film the various scenes of our films and microphones to make use we picked up the dialogue. After filming the footage for our films we then had to go and edit down what we had filmed using Windows Movie Maker, a basic editing programme used for editing down film footage. We used Movie Maker to edit down our scenes until we were happy and then needed to work and decide on the sounds that would be appropriate to go with it. We therefore went to the College library (as we were not allowed to use music by existing artist for reasons of copyright) and went through various CD’s listening for the right sound we were looking for and then added it to our film in the appropriate place so that the continuity made sense. We also added a drone to the beginning of the film with we recorded from a low key on a keyboard and which we faded in, so that the haunting sound got louder and louder as the action progressed. Once the editing was complete, sound and all, we formatted it and exported it to use later on.

When the end of our coursework started drawing nearer, we needed to write our evaluations about how we’d done, the good the bad and the ugly of the entire experience. We wrote these evaluations up digitally because that’s how they were to be presented to the examiner. The final digital technology we used was video uploading site YouTube on the Internet, where we uploaded our final main films as well as our evaluation along side for the examiners viewing.

The whole process was a huge learning experience, right from the initial ideas to the final evaluation. A chance not only to develop my creativity but also to put it into action through film making as I had never done before. The task of creating a ‘film’ seemed very daunting, and still does slightly, however having had the chance to experience the basics of what really goes into film making, I soon learnt that it wasn’t as difficult as it seems to make a film, and if I don’t say myself, a pretty good one at that.

Here is the main film for our AS Media Studies coursework

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