Evaluation - Overall.

i-D Magazine Proect – Evaluation – Ryan Tranter

I felt this was a really beneficial project and I fully enjoyed every aspect of it, through the project I’ve grown stronger and stronger with the camera where as I knew very little before about the basics so that was the first positive move to come out of it, Unfortunately.. research was never really my strong point, I would end up getting distracted if it was a topic I had no personal interest in, but the fact we were given the task to research music and musical fashion, which really excited me so I was able to put forth extremely sufficient research towards mine and my groups project.

There was three students in our group, me the designer and two photographers, and we started from day one with a different approach to the rest, instead of getting straight into the studio for photoshoots, I had already designed several possible templates for our magazine, while a lot of the groups weight was being put on my shoulders to research the genre of music we had agreed on because I had a few expertees in those fields so we struggled for photographs which I was extremely disappointed with,

Along with having my work cut out being the designer I had to take on a lot of the researching responsibility.

In the end our research appeared to have gone really well, and we got it out of the way quite early, while I was finishing on a few front cover drafts, we were given scheduled time in the studio to photograph a musician or make-believe bands, which to my disappointment our managed to get neither so we had to pull together some last minute make believe music artists including myself so everything seemed a bit rushed so we had to make do with very few pictures and models, as I set out to work with the photo’s I managed to finish a metal style rock front cover and a bright indie summer style, along with a double page spread interview that I made up and wrote myself. We weren’t able to meet the originally set deadline date because we physically weren’t able to get our work printed off and organised, that was probably our main issue.. organisation.

Despite the experience I gained from working with this large photography assignment, it turned out to be somewhat stressful in the end. Space and time were very limited and with Graphics and Photography merging the work environment was very hectic and it was difficult to work under those conditions, especially with the one printer.

In conclusion, there were a lot of positives but more negatives than I would of preferred, I am more familiar with branding and advertisement layouts, along with the photographic elements that can be included into my work, so hopefully I will be able to take what I have learnt from this assignment into my stride.

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Evaluation

Overall in the time we have spent at college on wednesdays is one of my favorite days of the week, it turned out how I wanted it to, exploring different areas of art and digital art has really benefited me with my knowledge of the industry etc. and I've had quite a lot of fun doing so and meeting some great people along the way.

We started out with Marie, which was the graphical side of it collaborated with Photography. We designed CD covers, posters and flyers for our make-believe band if you like, this was my favorite area up to now as graphic design and editing photo's is something I am really familiar with, despite the inconvenience of having to upload it all onto a blog, it has it's benefits and I do prefer it to cutting things out and copying it all up in a sketch book.

We first started out with CD covers, and were given the task of having to use a picture that was randomly selected by Flickr, This proved successful as I got some really nice pictures to work with. To create a CD cover I used Adobe Photoshop, applied gradient tints and various other layer styles and grunge textures, these were all my favored options when creating all the ones I did

SONY HDR - Panning - zoom - Focus.

We went out with the video camera and performed some of the basic techniques used in filming and media

which are Panning, Zoom and Focus.

Panning - Panning while filming is a term used for horizontal shifting of the shot, we performed this technique in the first 10 or 15 seconds of the video shifting from the left of our view to the right.

Zoom - Zooming in a film is to close in on your object or surrounding, simply described as a close up, but this can always disrupt the focus, we see a zoom in our video when the goose goes to the toilet, which will be subtlety evident.

Focus - Focus is the main point of attraction in a film or image that the light becomes clear and the rest of the image around the main point of focus blurs. 

Me and my group went down to the Andresey river bank in Burton because we felt that it had the best scenery in Burton town center, when we got there we found ourselves with a lot of wildlife to work with, mainly geese, unfortunately our footage never really stretched any further than that area itself but we explored all the relevant techniques.

CISCO flip Ultra HD

The Flip camera is a nice handy little piece of equipment and is ideal for family filming and capturing memories, but I wouldn't use it for professional purposes as it is quite difficult to keep steady, but negatives aside for such a small gadget it does a big expensive gadgets job in an affordable and working class fashion, I personally have tried one of these out of my brothers as it appears to have been a very big hit for a christmas present at only 100 pounds, it's the new generation of video cameras for families and very ideal for catching memories and watching your kids grow etc. It also looks ideal for a crowded place of quick capturing for a journalist or paparazzi, rather than sound recording. After looking at footage, the still picture looks rather sharp and in focus but like I say it looks very hard to keep steady which seems to unfocus and make the HD picture look a bit shabby.

SONY HDR-FX1

The SONY HDR FX1 is a beautiful piece of kit, and by the looks of thing it's very easy to handle, we will get a chance to go out with one of these next week, so the blog will be updated with my thoughts and the picture and ease of use, and maybe then followed by some edited filming we may have done, but looking at some footage on youtube, so quality looks beautiful.. like television standard quality even so it's not the biggest of cameras by any stretch of the imagination, to give time for the camera to pan, we were told that it's always a good idea to keep the camera still for 10 seconds before moving it, doing the same left and right. I found a video on youtube that demonstrates this really well so I shall post this below.

The HDR-FX1 includes a 3.5 inch. 16:9 aspect ratio diagonal high resolution LCD screen, featuring 250,000 pixels. The LCD features Sony's technology for best viewing in bright light. The LCD on the HDR-FX1 has been positioned towards the front of the handle, a unique position that breaks away from the typical left-side positioning. The LCD screen unfolds to reveal the HDR-FX1's VCR controls. The HDR-FX1 also includes a high resolution color viewfinder, also featuring 250,000 pixels. As a camcorder the HDR-FX1's main audience will almost certainly be very high-end consumers and professionals who seek the highest levels of manual control. The HDR-FX1 includes more manual control and "real button" control than any other Sony consumer camcorder in recent history, including the DCR-VX2100. 

Studio Shoots part 2

This is the first picture with the grungey background.

So I took away some of the pictures we did from the studio and tuned them into what turned out to be a mad photoshop experiment, which in my favour I think turned out pretty well. I started by adding some floral and abstract style brushes around my body and changed the colours around a bit, At this point it was looking very Microsoft Paint esque so I changed the layer styles of the brushes and added a few light asterix to my body. I then proceeded to have a colour tint background to my body so I created a gradient layer in red and blue and changed the layer style of the gradient to 'Linear Dodge (add)' all of a sudden it was all coming together, so after a bit of patching up and retouching with the photo and the effects I had a thought on what I could do next with the work so I added a stained paper texture which was really nice and grungy to add some depth and look to the background, lowering the opacity of the stains and giving it a red and blue gradient tint it all fit in quite nicely. I saved that as one version and then proceeded to create a second version without the grunge just to give it a more a veer towards the photography side rather than Graphic design. I then intended to use the design to see if I could make some CD covers out of it, after a second thought I then resized the photo to create a flyer for some sort of Party or Gig for example. I thought it would be good if I went with an American college theme after I found a nice old school font on the internet, after fiddling with the layer styles I got a really nice look.

This is the second of the pictures without the grunge.

I think that this picture is the smarter of the two without the grunge because it looks tidy and more complex than the other, with the others you could argue the image is too busy but I think this one has a nice volume to it.



This is the flyer I made from the picture, the word 'Waterloo Sunset' is a song by The Kinks and I think the word and the look of the word really fits in with the design. After a second look at it I would certainly use it as a CD cover or a promotion advertisement on a website or in a magazine e.g.