At the very start of the project I was nervous but quite excited. I was given the role of stylist which is something I haven’t done before. After the start of the project I was initially still very nervous, I was also struggling withsome personal issues so was coming in very rarely and was missing lots of crucial workshops and time with my group where I could have been developing and suggesting ideas for the magazine. I found it quite difficult to get started with styling ideas as for a while all of us in the group were on different pages with the aesthetic and theme so I was very unsure at times what I was doing, especially as I wasn’t present as much. I feel like I should have communicated more about my ideas rather than avoid them as I felt intimidated at times.

 

My job was to style and bring a certain aesthetic to the photoshoots for our magazine. I looked a lot at Instagram at upcoming stylists and photographers on there to inspire me as well which then helped me in a key part of my role which was, making concept and mood boards for our shoots. I also made a number of pinterest boards that I continuously added pictures to throughout the project to keep my inspiration going. We tried to make the overall styling of the shoots quite minimal as we didn’t want the styling to be too overdone or cliché as the magazine is based around not just the fun sides of nightlife and youth culture but also the serious sides. We wanted to create a really cohesive aesthetic for the magazine which was hard at times as we all have our own styles of work. This ended up being quite challenging at times as we all had to adapt our styles of working to suit eachother which in all is a good lesson to learn for the future when I have to work as a group in future jobs after University is finished.

 

I sourced clothes and props for shoots from friends, charity shops, ebay and depop to ensure that everything used was sustainably sourced. As a chunk of our magazine is street photography based I took out my point and shoot film camera to a number of events, clubs and parties and tried to gather more content for the magazine and social media. I tried develop our youth culture inspired theme by taking portraits of people on their nights out. In doing this I targeted my role as a stylist by selecting people to take pictures on depending on their style and when I thought their vibe would go with the overall aesthetic of our magazine. My inspiration for these shoots were taken from documentary photographers such as molly macindoe and ewen spencer.

 

There were the other challenges of the fact that we ended up pitching in a lot into eachothers roles which did create some tension at times but I think our magazine looks better because most of us all chipped in with different parts rather than just our specified roles and helped eachother with things where we struggled which was really nice to see.

 

On the whole I feel like I could have approached my role a lot better from the start which would have helped me to not have to do much more work in a shorter space of time, but I did really start to pick it up and put in much more effort from the middle til the end. I have learnt how to work as a team during this project which is valuable and I will take through into any other group projects after.

I haven’t got much on my blog as my reflections can be seen going through my whole sketchbook.

 

 

Throughout this project my consistency has been quite poor. My attendance hasn’t been great due to personal reasons and therefore I have missed a lot of workshops along the way. However, my sketchbook work aside from some of the missing workshops has been quite consistent. My evidence of research and development is recorded and presented on powerpoint as in recent times I have realised that writing in a physical sketchbook often takes way longer for me due to my learning difficulties. I have been using powerpoint for this current sketchbook which has made my presentation a lot easier as well as the layout of my work being more clear as my hand writing is often illegible and doesn’t look as well presented. I have learnt quite a lot of skills during this project despite missing a lot of workshops. Going to watch the workshops back afterwards as they are pre-recorded I have learnt how to use and experiment with illustrator which isn’t something I knew how to do before. Experimenting with typography and layout has really opened me up to using more of these skills in the future as usually my work is mainly photography based and now having some basic graphics skills I will be able to develop these and combine my skills to hopefully create some interesting editorials in the future.

My project initial ideas started off from thinking about how body image is portrayed in the media and this took me to a personal issue that I know myself and many other people I know with have struggled with and this is eating disorders. Whether they are triggered by mental health issues to start off with,  people making judgmental comments about your body or just the amount of edited bodies that are seen and thrown in our faces across all forms of media. From thinking about these ideas I realised that unedited and much more natural images of people doing normal, healthy things such as eating food are not put into the media enough. Many people across all age groups are struggling with their confidence because of the constant fake and edited images and body standards that are projected onto us from all angles. The younger generations growing up using social media from a young age are going to be especially affected by this as I know from experience and starting using social media at a key age of around 10 or 11. I then decided from this to take images using my film camera of not only people eating their food but of pictures of the food I have eaten myself. I decided upon the name of nourishment zine as this was a highly appropriate name and the tag line to go on the back cover – in order to flourish you need to nourish.

I came across a few hurdles in creating the content for my zine with my films not reaching the photo lab in the post, so I had to make use of the 1 film I did have developed which was only a few photos on the end of a film I had started using for something separate. I created a good balance of images to text and used a simple font as I wanted to have a good and interesting balance of negative space. Even with the I have still really enjoyed the project and feel I have learnt a lot of useful skills that I will be able to take into future projects even if this project hasn’t’ been my most strong so far.