Production Diary: October – November. Starting the magazine.

Firstly, I would like to apologise for the lack of posting over the course of the past 3 months. Heavy work and progress on my magazine and evaluations has taken up a lot of time which could have been spent writing diaries, meaning that posts have become less frequent.

In this post, I shall be discussing the main steps in the progress of my magazine and giving a detailed insight as to what happened and how I achieved it.

The end of October was when the serious work really began. Final drafts had been completed, model release forms for Daniel, Zak, Hugo and Aaron had been completed, surveys had been filled in and confidence was high going into the production.

November was to be the month of hard work. In this course, work comes thick and fast. As soon as one thing ends, another begins, meaning that time was of the essence. The month started with the “Scaffolding” for my magazine. It was vitally important that this was error free, even at an early stage. The scaffolding involved a certain amount of dedicated time on InDesign. This was not only tedious, but frustrating. Being uneducated in certain shortcuts or particular tools did stall my progress a little, as it meant that I had to spend more time doing things what could take a lot less time if I had known the shortcuts. Luckily for me, I had people around me other than my teacher who could teach me how to use them, meaning that I didn’t feel as if it was all spoon fed to me.

The whole scaffolding process took up at least half of the month to finish without adjustments. Further adjustments were made and are still being made.

A lot of my time in November was spent looking through different magazines to get inspiration. It would be a lie to say that I was happy with how the layout of my magazine looked after the first, second and third attempt. I felt that it needed to have a more realistic feel to it, which is why for an entire week, at home and school; I stuck my head into every kind of magazine in order to get inspiration from them. One thing that is important to any magazine is the style. It gives the magazine a sense of identity and meaning. I knew that I needed a specific theme or style for my magazine, with colours being the most important part of it. I decided to create a colour sketch board on PowerPoint. The presentation was short and very basic, but included all of the possible colours that I could use for my magazine. It was a long time before I finally decided to stick to the colour scheme of black, red and white – which were the colours I had used for my film magazine back in year 10 and 11. Once I was happy with the colours and brief style of the magazine, I started to feel a lot more confident about how my magazine would look. Things started to feel as if they looked right and my magazine felt very professional.

However, despite this slight increase in confidence, there was a challenge which did take a few attempts to overcome.

My main problem was being able to set out all of my texts and pictures on my contents page so that they were in line with the guidelines which we had to use when setting out our magazine. This was an extremely difficult activity because I am a particularly fussy person. Furthermore, I had basically settled with the decision to base my contents page on NME. However, the fact that everything needed to be in line altered how my final product would look. In all honesty, I was fairly unhappy about this, but I knew that in order to get the best marks possible, I needed to stick to the guidelines and advice given to me by my teacher.

Once the layout for the magazine was sorted, there were things that still needed to be done. I am yet to take and add pictures for my magazine and create logos for my band and other featured bands.

Read my next blog entry to find out more on the progression.