Freya had set up a go fund me for our magazine, we this shared over social media, to friends and family. We managed to raise £400!! This is great and we will definitely be using this sensibly! This money will go towards covering the costs of buying & developing film, Ink pads that we intend to include with every issue of our magazine and to print our magazine. I have estimated and gotten a quote from a printing website and we will be needing at least £250-£300 to print 70 copies. So we definitely raised enough for us to work with!

I picked up this book today to post to Poppy for her research. It seems very interesting and I will definitely be borrowing it after her for my own research for our magazine. It’s intriguing to me as I’m interested in analysing different identities and how they correlate to different genders, locations, ethnicities and embodiment.

In order for the magazine to have an ongoing general aesthetic and theme, I have been communicating with Poppy (our editorial writer) and Maddie (our graphic designer). Me and Poppy have been keeping in touch and discussing how the photoshoots will speak for the articles. For example, Poppy is going to discuss the unique experience of connection between the twins we shot with researching into twin telepathy and how twins communicate in a unique way in day to day life. I recently interviewed the twins asking them what human connection means to them and how they feel connected to one another. I recorded our interview and sent it over to Poppy for her article. I will also be interviewing Mia asking about her story on how she rekindled her relationship with her cousin who has lived in Australia since she was born. These articles really interest me and it’s also super fun to get to know unique stories from friends.

Me and Maddie have been working together in order to make sure our graphics and images correlate well. We’ve been messaging on Instagram sending each other inspiration for the magazine layout, promotional posters and stickers. Maddie has created some amazing posters that we have stuck around university, they include QR codes people can scan from their phones that take you to our Instagram account. We have also curated stickers that we have put around brighton that have the same QR code. I think this is a super fun way to promote our magazine in order to create an audience.

The past couple of weeks I have been very busy, we have finalised 3 main shoots so far and I am very happy with them. Although I feel as if I have been doing most of the work for the photoshoots such as the digital and film photography, styling, directing and planning so far, I don’t really mind as I enjoy doing it, as long as I get credit for it. We plan our shoots in our instagram group chat in order to see everyone’s availability and their ideas for the coming shoot, but I have found that half of the time my group doesn’t turn up. And the other half of the time I end up doing the styling and most of the photography. I have communicated to the photographer and stylist that it’s important for us all to engage and help out and I think they will be engaging more from now on. Freya our photographer has been more interactive in order to plan shoots and has made a go fund me to raise money for printing the magazine. Rachel our stylist has also helped with visualising the styling by providing mood boards.

I have created a custom filter that I have been adjusting to all our shoots so that our images fit the same aesthetic and theme. I have also been taking photos with b&w & colour film photography. I have just got the b&w film developed and I’m very happy with them! Some images capture shadows of people in their natural form on the beach! It’s very wholesome and really captures the raw honest reflections of human connections.

Yesterday I attended an induction for the professional photography studios on the third floor of grand parade. It was very exciting to learn how to use the newer more professional equipment. I learnt how to create a sort of ‘old movie star’ lighting using fill lighting, honey comb covers and snoots. It was really interesting to see the different types of lighting you can create in just one studio. I also learnt how aperture and shutter speed are important when creating different lighting, in order to adjust the camera to the levels of flash and angles. I also learnt that reflectors are an important aspect of lighting and can be used outside the studio when using natural lighting. Here are some images of the lighting I created and some important facts to know for next time I book the studio.

The concept of our first shoot is illustrating human connection through frienship. We decided to do the shoot at home in my bedroom and outside my house to convey the comfort of being in your own home, where most human connections are accumulated. I made my room look as cozy and homely as possible with trinkets, books and clocks so that theres a feeling of familirity. I edited the images so they look like they’ve been taken on a film camera to capture that similar vibe.

I was the photographer, stylist and director for this shoot and maddie was in control of the lighting. Whilst styling the models I thought about including corduroy and thick jacket materials like faux fur, sherpa lining and suede. I kept a brown/beige colour palette with a pop of khaki green and emerald green shades. I enjoyed doing this shoot and am happy with how it turned out. Although I didn’t get much help with this shoot, my room is quite small so there wasn’t much room for our whole group to help out. Whilst me and Maddy did this shoot, the rest of the group headed out to film/capture some social media content on the streets of Hanover. They created some Reels for our Instagram, Maddie and Lily edited the video clips they had taken into 1 minute videos for previews and content of what to expect for our magazine.

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

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.

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.

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.