JAMIE KESAVAN

0806454

UNIT EGRD 3015 INDEPENDENT PRACTICE 3B:

SUMMATION & PRODUCTION

At the beginning of third year, i honestly had no clue as to what the ‘form’ or the ‘theme’ of my Final Major Project. I started off attending weekly workshops for Screen Printing, Flash and with the work given to us from the university e.g. Three Minute Hero and ‘Do something you have never done before’ brief i was taken out of my comfort zone experimenting with film and packaging.

After researching and experimenting, my ideas had taken me into interactive design. After attending several group meetings with tutors, Luke suggested i take my idea of making an interactive website on bollywood dancing and change it to a iphone application instead as mobile devices is where the future of interactive design is heading. So between November to December i started watching tutorials online, reading books on creating an iphone application. In February i discovered that an iphone application was going to take at least a year and a half to create as there was so much to learn.

I then spoke to Ben Stopher from Graphic Design : New Media who lent me a magazine from Creative Review, which had a couple pages on creating an Apple iPad application in Adobe Flash CS5. A couple weeks later i realised i had another issue which was that i would need the full version of Flash cs5 which i did’nt have and Adobe were asking for £650.00, which i could not afford, for weeks i was back at the drawing board.

An idea then hit me during the group meetings we had in March, one of my colleagues mentioned that he wanted to ‘create a publication’. On the Apple iPad, an application was recently released by EMPIRE (Magazine on film reviews, news and gossip) which introduced interactive magazine publications on the iPad. The first time i tried the application i was blown away ! The interactive publication had features that trully amazed me, high quality videos, high quality photographs and text, interactive buttons that bring new and exciting features that gives the user a totally different experience to the print version. It allows the user to go as deep as they want to when it come to a story/article.

My new proposal is create a interactive magazine with my original theme of bollywood dancing as i had already started gathering media/photos research on this theme for months. The magazine would cover everything bollywood, including the origins, the different types of dance, interviews with real dancers, bollywood music, dance schools, how bollywood benifits health and fashion. With an exclusive dance video from a dancer, with adverts on dance schools, henna designs, photography.

I started looking at magazines in the house, around the library in university and buying new issues from shops and the app store on the Apple iPad. Including the following Asiana, Empire, Healthy, Mens Health, Wired, House Beautiful, IGIZMO. I chose to get a good variety of magazines as i wanted to break down the differences, get a feel for the kind of design each magazine brings to the table. I noticed that most magazines kept each issue cover layout the same e.g. Asiana every issue has the same logo placement, with a large amount of small advertisements on the contents of the issue.

I then started tearing pages out of magazines, that i thought had an interesting layout. Looking at the layout i tore out i noticed that they kept pages with a lot of information consistent on several pages, increased the size of qoutes, cut out pictures and gave them a more three dimensional look in the page.

When it came to articles on food and health, they use high quality images to cover an entire background and fit a small amount of text on the each side of an image. Some page layouts had text that would fit round an image as a way of making a large amount of text more easier to read.

I then done a quick excercise at home with some family members with the pages i tore out of magazines to see which layout they thought were interesting and the layouts they thought didn’t work. The majority picked page layouts with small amounts of text (bitesize text) and high resolution images that had a good structure that is legible.

I researched online on everything to do with interactive magazines until i found the information i needed, through my research i stumbled upon this link by Terry White (image on top left) on youtube. Terry White had an in-depth video on creating a interactive magazine on the Apple iPad, showing the process from Adobe Indesign CS5 to to syncing the publication to a free application on the App Store called Adobe Viewer.

He also showed viewers where and how to download the add-on in order to create the interactive magazine. Adobe created this add-on for Indesign CS5 as a Beta release for publishers to start creating these interactive magazines.

In the add-on download, you are given an instruction manual on creating the interactive publication and two packages know as the ‘Interactive Overlay Creator, and the ‘Digital Content Bundler’.

I started researching the bollywood dance schools my sister previously attended (Honeys Dance Academy) and the one she currently attends (Kuntals Dance school). Honeys Dance Academy is an extremely popular bollywood dance school as its not just based in the Surrey, they have dance schools all over the United Kingdom and some of her most experienced students are featured in bollywood films, music videos, and television shows. Kuntals dance school had only opened up in late 2010, Kuntals experience in choreography and dancing is excellent as she was a teacher at Honeys Dance Academy. Her students have performed in front of large audiences at the Croydon Mela and Fairfield Halls.

DESI TARA is a website where talent from all over the world can place their own videos, whether it be singing, bollywood dancing to street dancing. DESI TARA held a competition recently for the U.K. called Talent Hour, which started on the 24th of September 2010 and closed 11th March 2011. Hundreds of thousands people entered their videos and went in for an audition including some of the dancers i plan to include in the magazine.

I then moved away from looking at print layouts and started looking in more depth at the digital interactive versions of the magazines from Wired magazine, Empire magazine and IGIZMO magazine.

Their page layouts had no page numbers as there were pages going down vertically as well as across horizontally. One thing each magazine had in common was the ability to rotate the Apple iPad from portrait to landscape, with the magazine shifting in the same direction, allowing the user to choose their preffered reading position.

I definately wanted to incorporate that feature into my magazine as it shows i am not limiting myself to the one version of the magazine. When it comes to the number of pages, the interactive magazine ranges from 16-21 pages across and any number of pages going down vertically.

As i planned to film a dance performed by my sister and photoshoot different bollywood dancers i had to plan out all the equipment i needed to book up from the media store as well as planning studio bookings as the studio was based in a block of flats in Norbury.

Equipment for Filming the Dance

- Sony HDV Z5 camcorder x 2

- The Rig

- Canon EOS 5D Mark II

- Tripods x 3

- Reflectors x 2

- Lighting equipment

Equipment for Bollywood Dance Photoshoot

- Canon EOS 60D

- Canon 135mm L Lens

- Tripod

- Lighting equipment

The filming and photography was done in a private studio in Solent Court, a block of flats in Norbury. This was quite a challenging task for one person to do, so i took the advice from my tutors and collaborated with a friend from Graphic Design : New Media, Wynford Knuckles.

We took out a huge amaount of equipment as the weather is quite unpredictable and light changes during the day. We were shooting from 11am to 6pm for weeks as the original plan was to create a video tutorial within the magazine, on how to do bollywood dancing. Each shoot we had some strong short clips, but there were mistakes from the dancer which was taking well too much time.

I had to change and adapt my idea so that i could use some form of film in the interactive magazine, so on one of the shoots we asked the dancer to practice the full dance three times and then we would film the full dance and stick that in the magazine.

After importing all of the video files onto the Apple iMacs at university, i then copied all the videos onto a hard drive to edit at home using Premiere Pro CS5.

This was my first time using Premiere Pro so i was getting used to the user interface through video tutorials on www.youtube.com, www.lynda.com. The user interface is really easy to get used to after a little while as its similar to iMovie’s interface with the selection, cropping and dissolving effects using the tools given.

Week by week i planned and had photoshoots of different dancers, the very first photoshoot was exciting as i had only just started using the new Canon EOS 60D and 135mm L Lens from the university media store. I had no idea how powerful the L Lens was until i uploaded the images onto my mac. I continued to use this powerful fixed lens for every dancers photoshoot.

The first four bollywood dancers i managed to shoot at the studio in Norbury, the rest had to be shot at my house as the management at Solent court changed their mind about allowing me to use the studio for free, so they started charging me £50 everytime i used the studio. I also had the issue of dancers backing out last minute due to work which really set me back on getting the photos i need and money wise as i booked up the studio.

As the 135mm L Lens captures an amazing amount of detail, i decided to choose the strongest photographs and put the in a seperate folders named after the dancers to be edited using Adobe Photoshop CS5.

Looking back at my research i found that magazines used a lot of air brushing in their photographs and they love to show deeper colour in facial features along with clothes. Using the spot healing tool in photoshop i cleaned up the dancers faces.

I then went to Image, Image Adjustments, then levels to grab some of the colour back that was lost, and sharpened the image so that when i crop into the images for the landscape version of the interactive magazine the sharpness of the image is still clear. On the far right you can see the ‘Before’ above and the ‘After’ underneath.

Another interesting feature that i saw on several interactive magazines on the Apple iPad was an introduction video by the one of the people in the issue.

I thought this was a brilliant idea to add to my magazine to really show off the power and interactivity that is possible on these interactive magazines.

As my sister is on the main cover and is the only one giving an exclusive dance in the interactive magazine, i filmed her giving the intro video.

“ HI, KAYLA HERE, TALKING TO YOU ON THE NEW BOLLYWOOD DANCE MAGAZINE ON THE IPAD.”

“ THERE ARE A LOT OF GREAT AND EXCITING STUFF IN THE ISSUE !, HAVE A LOOK AT MY EXCLUSIVE DANCE VIDEO, WELCOME AND ENJOY.”

Adverts in other interactive magazines like Empire and Wired are for the most part related to the themes in the magazine, but in some occassions we see the odd advert about perfume/ alcohol.

I had a friend from work, Farzana Choudhury who is a very talented illustrator that also does henna for weddings and for friends. I asked her if she could come down for a film shoot for a henna advert. I originally planned my sister’s hand to be used in the henna shoot but as her hands were quite small, i asked Nadine Brown from university if she was available for a henna film shoot.

The recording equipment i used was the same as the photoshoot equiment, the Canon EOS 60D has a High Definition video recording feature and the 135mm L Lens has excellent quality and depth of field. I shot a load of small 20- 120 second clips of the different stages of Farzana applying the henna until the end, it took roughly 15 - 20 minutes to shoot, then editing it down in Premiere Pro CS5 brought it down to 3 minutes and 3 seconds. Which i then added authentic Moroccan/Arabic music to give a sense of the origins of henna.

The second set of shoots did’nt go as planned as i had a group of Bollywood dancers that were supposed to come down for a photoshoot but backed out at the last minute which really effected how i was going to continue with the magazine pages.

As the dealine was getting closer and closer, my only option was to replace them with other people i could rely on e.g. cousins, friends from high school, friends from university.

Although some of them actually attended a bollywood dance school others didn’t so i made up some information about their background, their experiences as a dancer and their aspirations later on in life. I wanted to keep it as realistic as possible especially as i wanted all the pages in the magazine to flow without the any issues concerning the length of the pages, the text and the photography.

I made sure i spent as much time and effort on the layout and design of their pages as well as other pages.

The first version of the magazine was very bold and simple, there wasn’t much experimentation with the title, or the stickers/sub header.

I started to research into textures and colours of different magazines and found that there are banners running down the bottom of pages, bright colours, maybe around two or three different typefaces used on covers.

On the far right we see my updated version of the magazine cover, i experimented with the typeface in Adobe Illustrator after converting it to outlines, creating the extended ‘Y’ in ‘Bollywood Dancer Magazine’. The image and the background remain the same, i adjusted the lighting in photoshop and also added a ‘smart focus on the image for the landscape version of the magazine. What i think really made the was the use of lights. I photographed some out of focus lights, brought them into photoshop and under the effects tool i chose lighten to remove the black out of the image and leave the blurry lights which i then placed on top of the background layer.

I also added an angle to the text in the sticker and added a video button to the cover to play the intro video.

This is another advert i designed for Kuntals Dance School. I asked for permission to use the dance schools name and information in the advert which she allowed as long as she saw the advert before.

Kuntals Dance School website was’nt very attractive and her logo wasn’t as up to date as i had hoped. So in illustrator i took a simple type face, turned it into outlines then brought the vectors into a 3d program called Cinema 4d. Which was later photoshopped to add creative lighting and layout a page.

One week i attended my sisters dance school to find out all the details about the song they were learning and asked if Kuntal could email it to me. I found out what the name of the song they were currently learning and added a 30 second audio clip to the advert so that the user could get an idea for the beauty and the pace of the song they would learn to dance to if they attended Kuntals dance shool.

As the weeks went on i gradually started producing draft versions of the magazine pages to see the quality on the ipad, see what works and what doesn’t. One of the main issues i had was putting video into the Interactive Overlay Creator as i would have problems with the quality of the film or the format as Indesign CS5 can only currently take MP4 format when it comes to video.

When filming the shoots i realised that all the video files were at a very high resolution and were .mov files. After collaborating with Nadine with the video editing software Premiere Pro CS5 i eventually figured out how to change the size and the format to fit on the Apple iPad (1280x720, mp4) through saving it as a H.264 file.

Looking back at my plan for the interactive magazine and actually going through the draft versions of the magazine i had created, it honestly didn’t feel complete to me as all that was in there were interviews with bollywood dancers and a few adverts.

As the rest of the year group were too busy with their Final Major Projects, i waited until my family came down one weekend to get some feedback from them on the current look of the interactive publication two and a half weeks before hand in. They felt that it wasn’t as enticing as it could be.

They suggested i look at adding new themes and features inside the magazine.

After, brainstorming and researching i finally came up with some more themes to talk about within the interactive magazine to make it more attractive and appealing. The updated plan above shows a history section bringing a page about the origins of bollywood dancing, Styles section bringing two pages on the different types of dances and a music page to discuss what the best bollywood music out at the moment. A fashion section discussing the latest bollywood clothes, accessories and information on how bollywood can benifit you health.

As the deadline was closing in i didn’t have time to plan and organise a catwalk for the page on fashion as this was a late addition to the magazine. However my sister has a good collection of Bollywood dresses from India which i used in the interactive magazine.

These photos were taken with the Canon EOS 60d with the standard kit lens as the 135mm L Lens zooms in too much and wasn’t really made for full body shots. After editing the photos i started sketching out possible layouts for the portrait and landscape versions of the magazine. Thinking about the interactive feature i could use on the page.

I then came up with the layout on the left, where theres a black mutiplied scrollable content frame for the text to go in, small icons of the same image converted into interactive buttons which when pressed enlarges the image in the box above.

I then moved onto the Bollywood Music page, which would have three of the most popular songs from Bollywood movies included as an audio sample. I also researched into some information about each album, including release dates, actors/actresses etc...

I knew copyright was going to be an issue at the show thats why i cut the chosen songs down to around 15- 30 seconds so that the user can get an idea of the music and the tracks.

The photoshoot for the accessory page i decided to shoot outside as i had some great sunlight, i managed to layout a table, an ornament of the dancing god was placed on the table in the background and my family brought over some Gold Necklaces, Bangles, Bindi and Ankle bells.

The accessories page was quite a difficult page to create, in order for the photograph and text to change once the interactive button has been pressed they would have to be one image. In order to get past this problem, i designed the page in Adobe Illustrator CS5 then placed it inside the indesign document.

I then created circular buttons that would link to the chosen image which at first would’nt link due to not grouping the button properly but i later figured it out and fully tested the page before moving on.

The history page is a really important page as its one of the first pages after the cover. I really wanted to show the origins of bollywood without showing the obvious map of India or an image of the Taj Mahal.

I searched online on google, on itockphoto and i found the image on the top right, its almost like a collage of screen prints, paints and henna tatoo ink. I thought this image was perfect as it had the perfect texture, vibrant colours everything about it related to India without actually showing india.

I made sure the dimensions of the image would fit on a portrait and landscape version of the magazine. I then added a scrollable content frame for scrollable text and a multiplied black box behind the text to improve legibilty of the text but still allow the user to admire the entire illustration.

This was another tough page to design as i didn’t have the time to actually photograph the different types of dances so i managed to purchase the three photos on each page on the left from istockphoto, which i thought suited thetype of dance perfectly.

As i had to think about space and use of user interaction, i decided to use the numbered button which would then link to a new article about a different style.

When i started creating the types of dances page, i realised i had hit the same problem as i did when it came to the accessories page where the pages had to be created to Adobe Illustrator CS5 to then be brought in to Indesign CS5 to add the interactivity.

The Health aspect of Bollywood dancing was something that i thought would be crucial to include as one of my family members has an excercise dvd on Bollywood dancing. It shows how bollywood could help in day to day activities as there is a lot involved in dancing, there precision and focus that also tests your memory and stamina.

The image was also purchased recently on istockphoto to represent the flexibility that you get when doing bollywood dancing as well as posture.

I also added a scrollable text frame and i have four useful examples that prove bollywood is good for the health. I believe that this page does bring a new dynamic to the magazine, giving the reader more encouragement to join up at their local bollywood dance school.

Filming the interactive magazine was another tough challenge as i didn’t know how to show both orientations without boring the people watching due to the length of the video. So the first thing i did was to film the entire portrait version, then the entire landscape version seperately. I then filmed a user viewing the magazine in portrait for half of the magazine then rotating to landscape for the other half of the magazine, which i thought was really effective as it shows the beauty of both versions in one video.

I plan to upload this to eithier Vimeo or YouTube and have a link on my blog as part of the submission.

After all the verticle pages had been created and completed. i then looked back at the manual to create the landscape version of the interactive magazine. which was quite simple, i duplicated the _v.indd (Vertical) file, changed it to _h.indd to represent (horizontal) file. Made a new folder and called it name_h Folder, placed the indesign document inside.

I then double clicked on the _h.indd file, waited for the document to pop up. Clicked layout, layout adjustments and turned layout adjustments on.

After this was turned on you go to file document setup and change the orientation to landscape, indesign does its best efforts to adjust everything on the page to fit. Once you adjust the page layout to your desired look, you then need to go to File, then package.

Once you have designed and checked the portrait and landscape version of the magazine, you can then open up the Adobe Digital Content Bundler.

When the Bundler console pops up, you click the button New, then you select the Issue that you want to publish.

Once the Content Bundlers progress bar is finished, you should see the image above showing all your pages as a list, which you then need to adjust into its proper placement, then name and add an issue desciption then press the export the issue button. Goto itunes, iPad, Apps, Adobe Viewer, Add to.. button and select the .issue file.

This has been one of the most challenging and exciting units i have ever done and UCA, as my proposal had started out as an iphone app, to an Adobe Flash CS5 app for the iPad, to an interactive magazine on the Apple iPad. I honetly still cannot believe that i created a fully functioning interactive magazine on the iPad, on Bollywood Dancing. If i could go back to the first month of third year where we were writing up our proposals for the FMP i would have loved to have started the magazine then, so that i could have explored more into Bollywood.

I am definetly happy that i stuck with the theme of Bollywood as i had researched and collected media for months, it would have been wasted if i had changed the magazine theme to something else. This is definately the strongest piece of work, in all my three years at the University of the Creative Arts.

The tutors really took us out of our comfort zones in the first semester, which in a way prepared me for the skills i needed to create this interactive magazine. As i covered magazine layouts, video editing, along with sound editing, photography and film. I gained skills in Adobe Premiere Pro CS5, Adobe Indesign CS5, Adobe Photoshop CS5, Adobe Illustrator CS5 and Cinema 4D. I believe that my time management has imporved even with having set backs with people not coming down to photo shoots, video shoots not working out the way i had planned i still managed to have a completed product ready and fully functioning.

The areas that i believe i could improve on would be my type setting/layout skills as i still struggle to see the problem sometimes and my video editing skills i would like to improve so that it is as strong as my other skills.

If i had more time on this project i would have liked to explore more features in the interactive overlay creator, maybe try and reach out to bigger companies and dancers to interview and feature in the magazine.

I am very impressed with my final outcome and i hope it shows my skills and knowledge and potential as an interactive designer.