My Fourteenth Mistake

With the actual production part of my coursework I though this would be a good time to post all three parts of it here before I forget. Firstly I wasn't too comfortable with saving the images in JPEG format because with personal experience this is one of the worst formats to save pictures in and I try to avoid it at all costs but I was asked to save it in this format so I promptly did so. 
Here is the front cover, contents page and double spread feature page. 

That's all Folks.

My Thirteenth Mistake

With the production on the publication I thought it would a good time to do the double spread article now so I didn't have to worry about that at a later stage, here is my first draft.

I will probably have to cut it down a bit because 1012 words is a bit much. 

You’re all fairly new to the music industry – this must be a daunting experience for you guys. How does it feel?

Well what can we say? It’s amazing, you know when you were younger and you used to play music really loud and pretend you were the one playing it that music. Well not the pretending part but when you were having fun playing that music. That sounds gay as hell, let me try again. It’s really scary because they’re so many legends and everything’s been done before, and you don’t wanna just copy someone before you, at the same time for most things there’s a reason why they haven’t been tried before.

The song “S.S.D.D” is the song you chose to release first as a single. Why did you choose that one? What’s the story behind it?

Ah right, well the letters in that song you may know stand for “Same Sh*t, Different Day” the title is pretty self-explanatory. The term comes from a novel written by Stephen King called ‘Dreamcatcher’. The story behind the lyrics is about many different people as they go through their days in hardships for example a young boy who is being bullied, a marriage on the verge of divorce etc. We all have this feeling from time to time, but the best thing we can do is to press on, besides that there’s not much that can be done but to press on and fake a smile so you can get through the day.

I was quite partial to the drumming and the bass playing, who were your biggest influences?

Ah, for bass there are so many people I could mention, but instead of going down a list of the obvious people, but I actually learnt to play bass by watching Michael Todd the bassist in Coheed and Cambria, he does the usual fingering technique common to bass, but his slap style is amazing, he really knows how to Slapa da bass man!                                                                                                                 As for the drumming, my biggest influence was “The Rev” God rest his soul, when he was alive he was my favourite drummer without a doubt. All the way from “Sounding the Seventh Trumpet” to the parts he wrote for “Nightmare” but since I’m not the only one who plays drums we are a collaborative so there’s some of us who play multiple instruments so another influence would be Lars Ulrich!

You say that you guys are a collaborative… How does that work exactly?

We all have our specialist instrument(s) we just think of a message or a story we want to tell then a bunch of us sit around and suggest a couple parts for the song. We only add something as a part of a song only if we all agree it sounds good and it fits where we want it to.

How did you guys form as rock collaborative?

Well it’s a bit of weird story, we started off as a 3 man band then as we started to write music we realised that it would sound better if we added someone who could play “this” then to counter that so that sound isn’t over bearing we needed someone who could play “that” and well basically the list went on, and on until we found that we had a collaborative. We probably could have cut some members but we decided we might as well do something no one has EVER done before. You know be original.  

Since you’re a rock collaborative, how do you make sure the music fits together without it sounding like a bunch of musicians all playing as loud as they can?

Well like we said because this has never been done before it came with many problems we had to overcome or we might as well of just stopped there. But essentially we don’t use everyone in every song. What I mean is, we have only written 2 songs in which we all play, the rest of the songs have us taking turns playing. Argh! This isn’t coming out right, what I’m trying to say is that, let’s say on one song you have Ollie on drums me on bass, Josh on guitar and Sam on vocals, we’ll probably have Josh playing bass the next song Hayley on guitar Doyle on drums, Tim on rhythm and once again Sam on vocals. We integrate it so that we each get to show case different talents instead of doing the same thing every time, this was if in case someone has a mental block on a particular instrument they can try again on a different instrument and we always have ideas flowing.

Where have you performed? Do you have any upcoming shows?

Well recently we’ve been touring with Billy Talent, those guys are some next level sh*t! Seriously, I knew they we good but they’re so energetic on stage it’s unbelievable, we’ve been opening for them for this part of their tour and we have just one more gig to open for them and that’s at the O2 arena. After that we’ll probably be getting ready for Sonisphere, we’ll be playing there so be sure to check us out, urm then we’ll be doing a country wide tour to promote the album.

And finally what’s up with the name?

(Laughter) Um well you see the thing with that is we’d been trying to come up with a band name for like weeks now and no one could agree on anything. One day we were pretty much baked I’m not gonna lie, and Sam, Tim and I were just sitting around and I can’t actually remember how we came to Penguin Philosophers, I think it’s cuz at that point same demanded we put penguins in the name and Tim was getting all philosophical (as he does when he’s baked) so that’s how we came up with the name. When we told the others the next day, well they weren’t in love with the name, but they didn’t hate it and we really needed a name for the band.  

My Twelfth Mistake

Deadline.


Well I have been taking my time because I thought I had until summer to finish this project, so now I need to actually begin the process of making my publication. 
Since I have decided to stay with the name "The Black Magazine" I started to give some thought into what the front will look like.
After I examined some covers I then had to think about what font, I didn't think any of the fonts suited what I was going for, so I decided to download some different ones and this is what I came up with. 

After a process of elimination I decided that the best choices were the: first, second and fifth fonts as I feel they best represent the look I am going for. 






















Anyway, I will blog more as I actually get things done on my magazine. 

My Elventh Mistake

How I turned normal images into Polariod pictures.

As I said in my previous post, I am going to blog about the process of how I made normal images to look like Polariod pictures.

I started by cropping the image I wanted to use, into a square and took out all the parts of the image I didn’t want.

I was then left with this image of just the part I wanted.

I then expanded the canvas to add the white boarder around the image. I then extended the bottom height of the image to make it look as if it was a Polaroid picture.

I then dropped a shadow to give it an authentic feel.

Opacity: 38%

Distance: 5px

Spread: 0%

Size: 5px

I then dropped an inner Shadow to give it a bit of colour so it doesn’t look like something that was made in haste is paint.

Opacity: 25%

Distance: 5px

Choke: 0%

Size: 57px

This is the result;

Notice the shading around the image

I then highlighted a part of the image I want to add a glossy finish to.

I then added a slanted text to give the image a bit of the boy’s attitude, and as a reference to a personal joke or them being on tour.

That's all folks!

My Tenth Mistake

With the initial planning of my music magazine, I decided to start on the production.

I started by taking various pictures of the people who I wanted as band members.

I then decided that since I am producing a magazine to promote a band's debut album I should also create an album cover for the band, which looked like this;

I started with a simple black background for the album cover then I added large white text over the black background in order to make this.

I then turned the layers I was working on into smart object layers and then I added a filter > Render > Clouds to darken the text then I used a brush tool to add a weathing effect to the text.

I will most likely change some aspects of this at a later stage. I chose a black background because the colour black represented rebellion, power, mystery and the a sense of perspective and depth. The black also represents a sort of blank canvas on which the band will build and grow. Since this is a debut album having a blank canvas seemed to be a fitting start because this is the same with artists, novelists and people, they all start from a blank canvas and then create something from that blank canvas. The white of the text represents the actual meaning of the colour white, which is usually perfection as the colour white represents perfection, but the weathered text denotes that the band is not perfect, it is not trying to be perfect it is simply trying to get its messages across via the music. The weathered white text also represents a sense of perfection stained by society and man kind.
The reason I chose a blank canvas for the album cover rather than a picture of the band is because the simplicity of the album cover is also a deliberate contrast to the complexity of the collaborative nature of the band itself.  

Moving on to the actual pictures I will be using, I am still in the process of reviewing the pictures I will be using for the magazine, but so far I have confirmed that I want to use at least this image:


 I am certain I want to use this image because of the way I managed to capture the text on the ad below them "Elite, Fresh & Hot". I thought this would be a great picture because it describes the band or how I want to represent the band anyway. I want them to be seen as 'Elite' even though they are new to the music scene they already deserve some recognition and respect. 'Fresh' because they will offer a new sound and a new way of attaining that sound, because this is a collaborative band with not just these four boys (although they are the main members) but including other people as well. As for 'Hot' that just happened to be there but it is an attractive photograph so I thought it was fitting.
Also the low angle shot makes them look powerful, representing that the band is in power and will not submit to authority. I am going to turn this image (among others) into polaroid pictures and then scatter them over a section of a page nonchalantly as if the band themselves took the pictures then scattered them over a page, this will represent them not caring and being very nonchalant about the way they present themselves. 
I want my other images to be turned from the one above to the one below:
(I will show the process I used in photoshop to get this effect at a later stage because current I am still learning it) 

My Ninth Mistake

The Seed of an Idea.

In the previous lesson I started to think about what I my magazine is going to incorporate and the features that it will contain.
My basic idea will be that the name of the publication will be "The Black Magazine". This is a reference to a number of different artists/bands who have had a multi-platinum albums with the title of "The Black Album" These artists include; Metallica, The Dandy Warhols, Jay-z, Prince and The Damded. The name of the publication also has a connotation of rebellion and revolutionary.
The band being featured will be called "The Penguin Philosophers"

Here is my initial plan of the magazine, it is a work in progress and I will add more to later.















Here is a list of things I thought of whilst making this and these things aren't concrete yet, I will probably change a lot of the things I did in this plan;

Title: The Black Magazine – as a reference to many artists who have had multi-platinum albums with the same title of “The Black Album” artists such as Metallica, The Dandy Warhols, Prince and Jay-Z.

Genre(s): The publication will focus mainly on alternative/rock but will cover other genres including; nu-metal, indie, rapcore etc.

House Style: The house style will be mainly black and focus around darker colours as a connotation of rebellion and revolutionary.

Comparisons: This publication will be related to other music publications such as, ‘Q’, ‘Kerrang’ and ‘Rock Sound’.

Brand Identity: Logo pending

Language: The language used in this publication will be informal.

Target Audience: the audience targeted will be of an age group of about 16 – 24 year olds. Secondary audiences will include people who listen to certain genres but it is not limited to a niche market.  

The band being featured in the double spread article will be “The Penguin Philosophers”.