Developing our media pack

This week we developed and presented our media pack. I was extremely nervous to present as I don’t do well with public speaking, but I think as a group we all did a good job. We were told that our aesthetic and magazine theme is consistent and we all clearly communicated what our magazine was about. For me personally I think I could have presented better if I had memorised what I needed to speak about and not just read from my notes. I definitely could have done that but I think my nerves got the best of me. I am also neurodivergent so I do struggle with making eye contact anyway. I think presenting the media pack when it’s unmarked is good for us to all become more comfortable with public speaking so we aren’t all as nervous when it comes to the real thing. Overall we did well and I enjoyed watching other group presentations to get an insight on what they’ve been doing.

The process of creating the media pack was stressful at first but after I assigned everyone specific aspects to speak about, it felt a lot easier as it was spread out fairly to each person. I was in charge of speaking about the overall Visual Identity. I found this was most suitable for me as Art Director. I spoke about how the colour palette contrasted well with the mood we aim to create in our images and overall magazine. I also spoke about how we are going to keep a consistent theme throughout by ensuring we maintain a comfort and ……………………..

Here is the presentation for our (unmarked) media pack. I created a shared powerpoint so that everyone could add their notes, images and titles we wanted to include. Maddie our graphic designer then created a newer organised slide show on indesign so that everything we wanted to include had an ongoing theme and wasn’t messy. We went through it together and decided what should go where and organised it so that it was numbered in the order of who was going to speak about what. If you click the link on the wording down below it should take you to our media pack.

ZEAL Media Pack

 

Researching and Developing ideas

This week has been very overwhelming for me! I’ve felt as if I’ve fallen behind on work a bit so I’ve been trying to push myself to do work outside of uni and to concentrate more in lectures.

On Tuesday we had a lecture with Mark where we studied ideologies of the Internet and how different platforms communicate them differently. This was helpful to see the different types of functional building blocks of social media as I didn’t know there were so many aspects you have to study and analyse for your audience in order to promote effectively. We also studied websites to see if their front pages follow guidelines that affectively grasp the audiences attention within the first 30 seconds of them looking at the page.

We then went onto preparing for our Media Pack presentations for next week. I noticed that we have been struggling visually for our magazine as we hadn’t yet created anything that represents the work we’re going to be developing. So, we went into town and to the beach to do some test shots. We experimented with some materials that we found at uni. The images don’t include any accurate styling so far for our aesthetic and we will be using couples as models for our proper shoot, but I think this was a good start for our experimentations with texture and getting us in a creative mindset in general.

I also set up a collaborative powerpoint with everyones names and titles of what they will be talking about in the presentation. This will be helpful for when we’re working from home and want to see what we’ve all been doing so we know we’re on the same page. We have also been communicating from home through an Instagram group chat I made a couple of weeks ago. It’s great to send our ideas or inspirations in there when we have them fresh instead of having to wait until the next group session we have together.

Zeal Magazine

The past two weeks we have been very productive during workshops. As a group we discussed and finalised our audience persona, our magazine name, manifesto and branding board! Although there are mainly only 4 of us from our group of 7 that turn up to sessions I think we work well as a team to get everything organised.

Our magazine name is ‘Zeal’ which means eager desire or endeavour. This ties in nicely with our theme as it is based around what constitutes a meaningful relationship in this day and age. Our magazine aims to explore what defines meaningful and sustainable relationships, finding new ways of being in an ever-changing world. We aim to communicate this creatively through digital, print and social media.

Maddie created our branding board which is a collective of images I found on Pinterest, a colour palette that was inspired by the magazine ‘sleazenation’ and the text/title fonts we aim to use. As we discuss as a group what we aim to illustrate in our magazine and possible future issues, Poppy our editorial writer concluded this all in a perfect summary for our manifesto.

Audience Persona was something we struggled with for a bit. But after we concluded we didn’t want to take an immature or sexual direction, it was easier to navigate. As at the start others wanted to lean towards more media content and online dating senses that I couldn’t visually see for us and also wasn’t something that we wanted to represent our work style on our portfolios. It was definitely something that made us all have a bit of an art block at the start, but now I can visually see what we are going to create from our ideas.

Starting second year

29/9/2022

Today was the first day back at uni! I was nervous to come in at first because I didn’t know what to expect in terms of group projects, but after meeting everyone I’m going to be working with, I can happily say I’m excited to start this project! We discuss the brief as a group and started to get to know each other so that we can start to openly share our ideas. I was given the position as the Art Director for group 1. I feel motivated for this position, I think I’ll learn a lot about taking responsibility for such a big part and will gain confidence to express my opinions and visions in the next few months.

After feeling inspired me and Kat decided to have a little explore in some magazine shops on our lunch break. It was helpful to see how different types of magazines are presented. We then went back and I started to develop some ideas with my group for our editorial magazine. We struggled to pinpoint an exact theme and aesthetic we were all happy with but it’s early days so there is no rush to decide just yet.

Because we were struggling as a group to pinpoint our idea and feeling a tad overwhelmed, I set us all a task to create a Pinterest board at home so that we could all take some time to think about our floating ideas and develop them visually. I think this will help us out next week as we’ll all come back with clearer minds about what we want for this project.

Summer on Film!

I haven’t updated my blog in a while so before I post about starting second year, I wanted to upload some images from summer! Since I had a lot of spare time I decided to learn more about film cameras. I started off with a cheap reusable £30 camera and found it was worth investing in a better one… so I bought an old Pentax! It’s like the one they used in stranger things I am very happy with it:)