Thumbnails And Design

In terms of the layout of my magazine, I have designed some thumbnail images to experiment with different design set ups to see what works best when I come to hand rendering some larger thumbnails and making design outlines on InDesign. These small thumbnails show layout designs for the front cover, inside spread for my main article and the contents page.

As another step forwards to making my layout designs closer to how the final product may look, I used InDesign to create some blockout thumbnails. Using the small hand drawn thumbnails, I created similar layouts by creating columns of placeholder text and blocks that represent the titles, images and block quotes.

Blue- Titles

Pink- Images

Green- Block quotes

Here are my hand rendered designs for my cover, contents and spreads with notes on how I intend to develop each ones, these are just a guide to help with the layout style.

Researching Public Information Films

This is a public information encouraging people to make more complex passwords that are simple to remember. The voice over is enthusiastic and clear and starts by telling the viewer the simple facts about the common mistakes people make when creating a password. The voice over doesn't use any jargon therefore the video reaches out to a very broad audience, even school aged children would be able to understand the video and learn from it. 

It isn't dark and brutally shocking like a lot of videos on internet safety as I find a lot of internet safety videos try and scare you and put you off of using the internet making you feel as though nothing is safe. This video however uses simple tactics that just hint the problems that you may face, for example, a credit card belonging to 'Penny Less' which is a clever pun that will make the audience think and figure out the point that is trying to be put across. 

A positive attitude is enforced by this video through it's bright colours, simply designed animation and happy characters. Repetition is used to make the storyline clear and easy to follow as there is a problem in the beginning and a resolution at the end. The credit card pun was a good idea so it's repeated as the resolution at the end and the name is changed to 'Miss A O'Kaye', showing that the problem is simple and quick to alter.

As an end card to the video, the information about where to find out more about the campaign is given, for example, a website and social media links. This is helpful as people can click straight from the video to read more information and also find similar videos.

Broadening The Mind Map

With 'Young persons political article' at the centre of my mind map. I was able to expand and gain a large collection of creative words that I previously wouldn't have linked to my political magazine. I was able to suggest draft ideas that could be used as a basis for a less generic article in my magazine that aims to change young peoples views on politics and make them interested.

I came up with the idea 'Rising Stars of Politics'. This article has the potential to be a weekly feature in the magazine, each week there would be information about a young person who is becoming involved in politics, whether they're a young MP or just someone who is opening and expressing their views on what could be done to improve the future of politics. But it could also be a larger one off article that informs about multiple young politics from different parties and backgrounds. The article would contain basic information about the young person eg. their name, age, where they're from and their current state of education/employment. After a brief background is given to introduce the young person, it would go on to talk about the young persons involvements and interest in politics with a possible interview or quotes from the young person themselves. Having quotes and interviews makes an article more engaging as you get the unaltered views of the subject of the article.

In terms of layout, the article would be on just one page as a feature that introduces multiple young politicians over a series of weeks, rather than bombarding the reader with information about one person in particular. The article would start with a fact file to introduce the young politician in a easy to read and non complex style. The rest of the article explaining what the young politician does in more detail would follow in columns, interrupted by block quotes to attract attention and give the audience interesting information. I would like to include an image of the young politician and if possible, a picture of them in action/working to show the contents of the article in an image form.

Here are some draft name ideas outlined using words from my mind map.

The Walk Sequence

The walk cycle is an essential sequence of movement in animation. After drawing someone in different positions of a regular walking movement you can produce frames to make your figure look as though it's walking on the spot or walking forwards or backwards.

This sequence of figures is made up of nine different positions, the more different positions you have, the more realistic the flow of the walk looks. You can use as little as four frames for your walk sequence however your walk will look less fluent. 

Using the sequence above as a template for my sequence, I created a layer for the template and another layer on top for my figure tracings. I proceeded to trace over each figure on the correct frame. Then using the lasso tool I separated each figure. 

The next stage was to create another layer called Guideline on which I drew a line as the 'floor' for my figure to walk on. I then place the first figures feet on the line and drew a dot above it's head, still on the guideline layer, to help with positioning. I inserted the guideline frame into nine frames as I had nine different figure drawings. I then locked the guideline so the only drawings that moved were the figures. 

On the Figures layer I moved each figure onto the guideline, each on a new keyframe so that the next frame didn't include the figure from the frame before. After completing this for the nine frames of each figure I deleted everything from the template layer and deleted all of the original traced images, leaving just the figure on the guideline. 

Finally I added a look to the sequence and slowed the FPS down to seven, this left me with a realistic walk sequence. 

Accessibility, Signal and Subtitles

Signal
The signal is the value of how good and clear the audio is. A good signal would mean that there is no competing background noise therefore the audio would easy to listen to without interruptions. 

Noise
A constant wave of audio that competes with audio they you are specifically trying to record, fluctuations of noise go along side an electrical signal.

Interfering Noise
These are sounds with a negative sound quality which is unpleasant to listen to. For example, when you put your phone next to your computer you hear feedback sound.

Somes location with noise issues are:

• Road side
• Busy cafe
• Building site
• Party
• Town centre at midday

Accessibility

There are different things put in place to help the accessibility of media when people have disabilities, difficulties or impediments.

Television has subtitles, audio description and sign language in the corner for some programmes to help people who have difficulties with sight and hearing.

Cinemas offer autism friendly screenings which cut adverts and show the film with a lower brightness and lower volume level. Cinemas also offer some subtitled screenings which are limited.

Radio is purely audio so there isn't a lot they can do to help with accessibility but radio presenters keep their wording as clear as simple as possible and avoid playing loud or offensive sounds.

Online videos such as YouTube have a subtile option on a lot of videos. I have looked at the subtitle settings for one of my own YouTube videos to see how it works. There is an option where YouTube makes a guess as to what the words you want to subtitle are but it isn't very reliable. I watched my video and typed the subtitles real time so that they were accurate, I then adjusted them so that they were as in sync as I could make them.

Beginning To Mind Map

As my magazine is primarily going to be aimed at teenage females with the aim of encouraging them to vote. After mind mapping some ideas and concepts about the aims of my magazine I decided I would like to include an article about the Suffragettes and the right for females to vote. Points I would focus on are:

• Who were the Suffragettes?
• Why weren't females eligible to vote?
• What did the Suffragettes do?
• When did females get the right to vote?
• Key personalities in the Suffragette movement.
• Why it's important for females to use their opportunity to vote.

Here are some images that would work well with the topic of the article as well as the style of my magazine:

As some of my magazine will be in an arty, scrapbook style I think these images would compliment the design because of their vintage look. The images are strong and biased towards making females look good which I hope will encourage teenage girls today that they too can have the same power as the Suffragettes did.

Recreating A Layout

What I knew?
I knew that print publications like magazines had a bleed because industrial printers that print out large amounts of magazines at a fast pace aren't able to be exactly accurate. The bleed means that the ink printed is slightly larger than the paper itself so that the colour or picture goes right to the edge of the publications. 
I was aware that an affective convention of magazine layout is to put interesting or intriguing information as a large pull quote as the readers eye will naturally be drawn to this part of the document, making them want to keep on reading.

What was the task?
As a task, the challenge was to choose a double page spread from a magazine and copy it as identically as possible using InDesign. I chose a double page spread on The Dark Knight Rises that has a combination of large titles, shapes, columns of text and a large image that is printed between both of the pages.

What do I know now?
To be able to recreate the magazine spread I had to use tools I hadn't previously used in InDesign. Usually when using InDesign I work on a single page document but this time the canvas was different with a line down the middle showing the two sides of the double page spread. 
When setting up the canvas I used the bleed option for the first time so that if the document was to be printed the images would go right to the edge of the page and look just how the original magazine looked. I learnt how to create separate columns for text as I had to create 4 columns, 2 smaller and 2 larger, for the text. I used place holder text to fill the columns and used the red cross button to drag the place holder text so that it was feed through to the next column.
So that everything was placed correctly I made different layers for each part of the document eg. background, title, body text, images. This meant that when I used the polygon tool to create my arrow shapes I was able to put them in a layer behind the text so it would be neat and the same as the original publication.
To make the arrows I had to use the polygon tool as my way of drawing. As the polygon tool only allows you to draw simple, basic shapes I had to draw a triangle and put them together. So InDesign would treat the two seperate shapes as one I learnt the shortcut Cmd+G to group the shapes so any adjustments I made would be made to both of the shapes.