FANZINE Assignment : Task 7 : Evaluation

Overall I am pleased with how my project has gone, especially the magazine part of it. I've always loved graphic design so I found myself flowing with ideas for this part. I found it really hard at first to come up with ideas for my video and how I wanted to montage it together. But once i'd got started, and especially after I'd chosen the song for my video montage, it became easier. My video and magazine work well together because they both give information on the same shop - Purple Haze. I was very lucky that they gave me permission to take photos and videos in the shop as a lot of shops don't allow you to take photographs in them for security reasons. They let me stay in the shop for as long as I wanted which meant that I could get all the material I needed in one visit, even though they said I could go back if I wanted. Even though the camera I used for the video part was not the best quality, this didn't really matter for my handheld filming. I took different types of shots - wide ones of the whole shop, close up ones of the materials and clothing rails, and video clips of certain objects in the shop. For a lot of my video clips I used panning to keep it more interesting rather than still images. I think if I was to do this again I would have longer panning shots so I could afford to cut them down and only have moving images, rather than an image that starts off still and moves after a second or two. When I first started to put my video clips together I felt like I needed to use whole clips at a time. However, after watching it through, it was starting to look slightly boring and drag on, so I shortened the video clips right down to every 4 beats of the song rather than 16 beats. I had plenty of clips so I didn't have to repeat anything. This made it a lot easier to keep the viewers attention. Whilst I was in Purple Haze, I interviewed the staff and asked them a few questions. They were happy to answer them for me, but unfortunately they refused to speak on camera. This meant that I had no footage of them to use in my video zine. I then condensed down what they said, scripted it, and asked my Mum to read it out as a voiceover on my video. This gave my viewers a slight break from constant video clips accompanied by a song. The song I chose is called Semaphores On The Lawn by Little Comets. When I was in Purple Haze recording my video footage and taking my photographs, I noticed they played a lot of Little Comets music, including this song, and music similar to it. Since Little Comets are one of my favourite bands, it was easy for me to use this song as I already have the CD to import into Adobe Premiere when making the video. I wanted to use this song because I thought it would make the vibe of Purple Haze come across in the video if I used songs that they actually play in their shop. When I overlaid the audio of my Mum speaking on top of the video, I realised I needed to make the song quieter while she was speaking, to do this I pressed Command and clicked on the yellow line which ran through the song. This made a point that I could move up and down to make the volume higher and lower. I added a few points to fade it in and out so it wasn't so sudden. Considering that I was so worried about doing a video because I've never done one before, I am pleased with how it has turned out. I am more proud of my magazine, though, because graphic design has always been a love of mine. I found it relatively easy to come up with content for the 12 pages of my magazine, due to always reading fashion magazines and blogs. I like my magazine and how it looks quite arty/crafty and not too neat. I like how things overlap, how the images have white backgrounds like they have been cut out and pasted, how the background of my text is coloured and it doesn't look perfect but it works well for the style of magazine.