Main Task - Music Magazine Cover First Draft

The is the front cover for my music magazine. Once I decided on a main picture for my cover out of the ones most recently posted I began to add aspects to it that would make a music magazine. The image shown is actually my 10th stage of production, and it feels good to have progressed so far from just a picture. To the picture itself I applied lighting effects and added make-up using Adobe Photoshop (compare it to the raw image shown in the last blog post). I also added text about the cover girl and also about other bands that will appear inside the magazine. As well as this were components essential for a magazine, such as the barcode, the date and the price. One can also see that I used the masthead that I decided upon earlier.
I will talk later about the different processes involved in the cover's creation in detail, along with pictures showing the different stages I went through and choices I had to make.

Magazine Photos - Third Attempt

For my third attempt at photo-taking I decided to take pictures of each of the three girls form the last photo-shoot by themselves. This way I could incorporate the last set of pictures with any I took this time, since I felt I didn't have enough good shots to use on a front page, contents and double-page spread. I mainly did medium close-up shots, as I decided that this was what I wanted to do for my cover. Also, I applied some effects to certain photos, since I have been experimenting more in Photoshop lately. Here is a selection of the photos:

 

 

 

Double Page Spread Article - First Draft

The following is the article/interview I wrote for my double page spread. I did this when I thought that I was going to have Jonny on my cover when I was about to do my third set of photos, but then he let me down and I was unable to use him. Therefore for my next draft as well as making the article better I may need to change the person being interviewed to a girl, but that shouldn't be too difficult.
I tried to retain the more colloquial language that music magazines tend to us, though as stated before I am trying to create a more respectable magazine, which is why I did not swear constantly. I was a bit worried about including certain bits, such as the final joke-type question, but as said before there is still time for me to make improvements.

Magazine Photos - Second Attempt

The following photos are, as one could deduce from the title, my second attempt at taking photos for the music magazine. Like last time I am only including a selection, since there were some that were either extremely similar or extremely bad.
And now, the differences in this set of pictures from the last. Firstly: I used girls. I did this because I had access (bad choice of words) to girls who looked a lot more mature and therefore better suited to be in a band, as opposed to my friends who do just look like teenagers messing about. Also these girls are more attractive than my friends, which means that the potential audience of my magazine will like them more and also I'll have less work to do on Photoshop. Another major thing that I changed was the setting; previously I had gone for the garage band look but this time I used a white background which gave the whole thing a more professional feel. The clothes the girls were wearing were better than before, but still not really perfect. They looked very good and cool individually, but had little coordination all together.

Magazine Photos - First Attempt

Below are photos taken from the first set of pictures I took to possibly include in my magazine. I organised after school one day to gather three of my friends at another friend's house. I asked them to bring their own clothes, ones which would give the impression of them being in a band, and I got them to do a variety of different poses in my friend's garage. In the first few pictures everyone is still wearing their suits, as I thought it would be interesting to experiment with more than one set of costumes. In some shots they are holding/using instruments, in others not.
Overall these pictures didn't turn out all that well, though that should be forgiven as this was my first try. The main reason for my failure is probably the setting, since a garage (despite the popularity of garage bands) is probably not the best place to take photos for a professional music magazine. Another problem is likely that that friends I used didn't look enough like they were in a band. One of them (Jonny - the boy with glasses and a hat) looked actually quite suited to be a musician; the other two did not. Also a problem was that their clothes weren't really coordinated enough, so even if each of them looked like rock stars they wouldn't have looked like they were in a group. I tried to take all these factors on board and improve on them when taking my next set of photos.
Also, please forgive the somewhat deranged layout of the photos; Blogger makes it exceedingly difficult to post multiple pictures in any sort of sensible order.