Front Page Improvements

I took on board the construction defaults people found with my front cover and I then re-designed some aspects to my front cover. I added more text to the front page, making it look fuller and more complete than the desperity to which it looked before. I have also reduced the feather on the main image; this makes the picture look less blurry, especially around the hands of the subject. I have also re-edited the colouring of the subject on my picture to better suit my magazine. The re-edited front cover is below.

Front Page Draft Feedback

Above is my first draft of my Music Magazine,below are the comments that were made on my magazine and what the rest of the class thought of as a whole.

Summary of comments;

• Needs a larger title 
• Bit too much space, i.e. too much background not enough text
• Need to reduce the feather on the main image so it is not as blurry.
• Make everything bigger basically.

What I plan to do with these critisisms;

I plan to enlargen the title to emphasis it more and appeal higher to the reader; it will lure them in. I am going to reduce the amount of space on my front cover by including more coverlines and text. As for the image I am going to reduce the feathering of the pixels so that it does not create as big of a blurring effect on the picture.

Doing these adjustments to the photo should help increase the target audience's opinions on the idea. From research I have found that all front pages for every music magazine have a great front page picture; there is no blur evident.  

Front Page Construction 

  

Coverlines I will use: 

'Leigh Peterson bursts onto the indie scene'

'Exclusive interview with Metronomy'

'Behind the scenes with Luke Black on his upcoming UK tour' 
'Win a Fender Newporter!' 
'Refrain's top 20 albums of all time!'
'Best indie artist of all time?' 

My front cover construction before class feedback

More PowerPoint presentations from Kane

Above is the construction of my Front cover; it is everything up until the class feedback on my current progress.

These are the videos I have made to show how I made my Front Cover

Photo Shoot Film Strip

These are all my intial photo's I took for my Front Cover, Contents and Double Page Spread. I took these all against a white background because my research has shown that a clear, white background is most effective for front cover pictures especially. Although, I do not have access to a fully equipped photoshoot studio like the big brand music magazine companies like NME and Q I have tried to effectively use the equipment I do have.

The Photo Shoot

The Photo Shoot

For the shots I made sure that I had a clear white background, the only white background I had access to was a wall, I also used a big worksite light to fully light up the subject and eliminate the shadows. The extra light and the flash of my camera dramatically improved the quality of pictures and also allows me to work with my pictures on photoshop more.

The camera I used for my media shoot was a Canon 550D, I had changed the lens from my usual 18-55mm lens to my 28-105mm lens, I did this because it allowed me to zoom more and also it lets in more light so I could adjust the aperture to suit best.

I used a fairly basic tripod for steadying my camera; this was because I had no access to a tripod of  a higher standard. The tripod I used was a hama star 61, although it may not be the best tripod on the market; it still effectively steadied my camera while taking the shots.

Also, to film the photoshoot I used A GoPro HD Hero, I used this because it has a very wide angle lens pre-built onto it. It has a 170 degree angle of view; this allowed me to fit me and the subject into the video, although the camera doesn't have too good aperture so the filming was bad in the low level light conditions I had at the time.








 The video light I used was a 500W portable halogen light it couldn't be plugged into the mains electricty to start with so I had to plug it into a transformer. I used this video light to effectively brighten up and enhance the subject. It also gave my camera more details to pick up when taking the shot.

 This is my actual camera and tripod set-up to the left, I haven't included the work site light because it ruined the  picture I was taking with my other camera - the brightness was blinding my camera, you couldn't see the set up very well.