Tattoo Ideas

Final Video Edit

Creation of preliminary task.

Evaluation

Grace Moxon
Last year for my AS Media foundation portfolio I had started with a given Preliminary exercise to learn and practace skills when using Adope Photoshop, an image manipulation programme. The Preliminary task's breif specified that I must use DTP (digital technology programmes) and an image manipulation program, produce the front page of a new school/college magazine, featuring a photograph of a student in medium close-up plus some appropriately laid out text and a masthead. Additionally I produced a mock up of the layout of the contents page to demonstrate my grasp of DTP. Additional to this I had to research and analyse codes and conventions of existing college magazines.
The main task after the Preliminary task was to produce my own front page, contents page and double page spread for a music magazine with original photographs. I identified in detail the codes and conventions of existing magazines. I then used the research that I gathered in my portfolio to produce the music magazine. I began to learn how to use Photoshop and the preliminary task which was to create a college magazine front cover was the first opportunity for me to demonstrate some of these newly acquired skills and techniques.
I began the planning for my music magazine by choosing a particular genre of music my magazine was going to promote and then the target audience to which it was going to appeal to which I believe was 13-30 year olds. I looked at some existing double page spreads and noticed how the articles are organised into columns with a large main headline across the top of the two pages and quotes pulled from the article that have been emboldened and used as sub-headings for emphasis. I took into account these existing conventions and used them in my own production.                                                                            
Further research included identifying the codes and conventions of existing music magazines such as NME, Kerrang, Q and Classic Rock Magazine, for example: the masthead and it’s use of typeface, the choice of a main image and its positioning across the page, the use of cover lines and also the choice of a suitable colour scheme. The biggest influence on my magazine was probably Classic Rock magazine because of the genre of music it promotes.              
  I used the Internet as my primary source of research for visual material, where I was able to gather examples of different music magazine covers and double page spreads which I annotated and then posted onto my blog as examples of music magazine conventions. But had also seen examples of real magazines through my own music magazine collection and magazine's provided by college. I called my music magazine “JSM” which was partly based on NME's title and also my initials.
Regretfully and due to informality, I hadn't taken GCSE Media Studies before I started sixth form college, this would've helped me a little by giving me some previous knowledge but I coped okay with the given support at college. All I really knew before I had started study's media was how to frame a photograph successfully which I took into account when photographing the subjects.
There were many new creative skills which I acquired during AS, for example learning to use Adobe Photoshop which I had no previous experience with at all. The specific skills I learnt on Photoshop which proved the most useful during my music magazine production were cutting out photographs using the magic wand tool and magnetic lasso tool, changing the resolution of the photographs and organising different layers of a piece of work to resemble a professional standard to be more visually pleasing to the audience.            
I also became more fluent in digital Photography as that particular element of the magazine required me to take original pictures for the front cover, contents and double page spread of my magazine. For this task I borrowed a SLR camera from my college to take the variety of images. Many I had taken at live gig's performed by local bands and others were taken within college during lunch/break times. I would of used my own digital camera but I wanted to produce my magazine to a professional standard and I knew that the quality of the photos would be much better in high definition; this also meant that I could edit the photos without losing quality. Many different photos were taken which were eventually transferred onto the computer and I then picked the photos which I felt were the best.
The final product itself was created using Adobe Photoshop technology on the computer where I applied the skills which I had learned previously during the production of my college magazine and skills which I learnt on the way through advice from teachers and fellow students, to enable me to complete this task. For one of my first ever drafts I used the online font generator “dafont.com” to choose the typeface for my masthead. But evetually decided to take a more original approach via creating my own masthead from scratch on Adope Photoshop.  
During the production of my final piece, I resized my chosen photos appropriately, for example, my front cover featured a large medium close up shot of the subject which took up the majority of the page, I then placed the masthead at the top of the page and cover lines around the photo, utilising the negative space. My magazine featured a black, orange and white colour scheme because I was advised it is wise to keep this colour scheme all the way throughout the magazine sample pages so it isn't overwhelming and to show the pages are from the same magazine, which I was also very obviously quite popular amongst existing magazines.                  
After completion of my piece, I uploaded the finished copies of my magazine and transferred them to my blog as jpeg images so it could be viewed and assessed by others. I also printed a copy of each page so I could personally gain audience research by asking questions on particular aspects of the piece and whether or not it was effective and video the answers for evidence. The most challenging aspect of the task for me was the creation of the contents page which has the function of directing the readers to particular articles inside the magazine; therefore it needs to include many small coverlines with images wrapped around the text without looking too packed. My contents page went through many changes and improvements during the creation change and I still wasn't happy and wanted to tweak it further after the deadline time.
In conclusion, AS foundation media taught me many new skills that would become useful and can also be carried through onto the A2 work such as photo editing, analysing a media text in terms of its codes and conventions and how to use correct framing techniques when using a camera.
For A2 my Media Studies production I have decided to create a music video. I have chosen the song 'Fuck Authority' by a punk rock band named Pennywise. I chose a punk rock song because I want to show rebellious action in the video, and because punk music is my favourite type of music, mainly because of the messages conveyed about political issues in our society today and the history of the revolution in the past. I love the way the band is not mainstream, mainstream band's music is often plane and just made to make money, yet Pennywise preech many punk rocker's message of not being the same as everybody else and have an independent attitude to create songs which are fast paced too, as they tackle political issues via somewhat preeching through the lyrics they use. The most inspiring music video which made me choose a song which has real meaning is the music video to the song BYOB by System of a Down and the stylistic features of Smack My Bitch Up by Ther Prodigy inspired me to include substances which many people's attitude is changed by drastically. The fact that there is not an existing official music video for the song I have chosen has helped me picture my music video with a much clearer vision, and also very importantly I did not wish to risk plaigarism if the existing video was to include the best possible things to their song.
To match the independence of the song, I chose not to include something such as a dance routine, as they seem to be in almost all of the chart music videos, although I strongly wish to skip to a band actually playing the music throughout the video on occassion because through my audience feedback I have learnt that fans of bands almost always wish to see the performers perform in the video, because the music is not all about the story conveyed to associate to the lyrics, it is to also show those artists who were the creators of the music and a lot of people judge an entire band on what types of people the artists are (style, attitude and opinion wise). I believe that by constructing my music video  occassionally using the form of performance as well as having a main character's journey of clips of the character being rebellious edited precisely to the beat, my music video may not fit the codes and conventions of the genre, but add to it. As I have found that many punk rock music videos are focused on live performances, shots of the band playing and their fans. An entirely performance-based music video to accompany songs are more typical of mainstream artists in my view and commonly the R&B genre, as many of the viewers seem to want to be dazzled by thier physical appearance rather than the message which is conveyed through the lyrics. My music video needs continuity to support the narrative which can be seen to associte with the message of the lyrics, mainly 'fucking' authority, therefore being a rebellious teenager who has seen a darker side to our society (bourgeoisie being a threat to working class people). Although I have faced some issues with showing this point of view through the main character so I am working on the creation of a paper made puppet show. Depending on the viewer's beliefs, it is their interpretation of what is shown to them in the video, therefore I believe my music video can be abstract
I see one of the codes and conventions of both abstract and performance videos in the independent genre usually portrays ‘real life’ situations. For example, a lot of riot scenes are shown in punk rock music videos (rioters being unfairly abused by the authority system). System of a Down's music is not punk rock but I believe they largely share the point of view of many punk rock band's, they just convey their message in the lyrics through differently styled music. I have brought System of a Down up because their music video to BYOB has a riot squad which have 'obey' digitally written on their protection masks/helmets - this conveyed to me that members of the force are controlled by consumerism and have accepted money to be payment to set a hierarchal norm of today's community. Yes, the bands which have inspired me and the band of the song I am going to use are all American, therefore the issues they tackle are more drastic than the British situation, but I believe the British society is extremely similar to Northern America's via the current right wing rulers. In association to the right wing, the news of today is that Margaret Thatcher is deceased, I may incliude some last minute touches of her in my music video to further challenge the effects of a right wing run nation - parallel to the current status.
Punk rock to me is a very artistic genre, especially when it comes to extreme physical appearance through things such as tattoos hair and fashion style, an iconic style of punk is commonly DIY clothing (studs, band patches, painted jackets) and mohawks or hair which is shaved and dyed in an individual manor. Therefore, I have chosen one of the band members of the performers to wear my leather jacket which I have painted the back of and added a variety of studs to myself. The other band members wear dark clothing and band t-shirts to show what type of person they are through the non-mainstream bands they listen to.
I have had a variety of ideas for my msuic video, including sexual differences, Jeff (one of my closest friends who went to the woods with Emily and Paige Windley) to be expressing the non-stereotypical of expressing anger for a man
another a girl being abused both physically and mentally by her 'boyfriend'. The title 'It's comlicated' fits with this symotanteously, yet in a much more extreme sense

Album Cover Draft 2

So far I have finalised what I want to be my band name is (S& M) and I've thought out a different album name (Overdose). Using the same font for all of the characters is not a conventional style for punk rock album covers, so last night I founded some of my old rock magazines and cut out a few letters to create a ransom note style for the name of the band. Overdose was roughly cut out from the perfume packaging of 'Loverdose'. I couldn't find a '&' sign so I tried out a few styles to create it myself on paper, I used mascara, nail polish and even red lipstick to create a roughed up punk rock style, finally I settled with the nail polish drawn and mascara textured '&' then I burnt one of the edges of the roughly ripped out '&' to give it a trashy look.

This is the 'S' I am going to use for the cover of the album

I was testing a few ideas for the '&' sign, this was one of them.

This is what it looked like with the other parts of the lexis 'S & M'

This was another testing idea for the '&'. This is what it looked like with the other parts of the lexis 'S & M'

Here's the 'M' I am going to use.

Here's the Album name.

The complete result. All I need now for my album cover is some decoration and a main image.

Changing My Song!

I have been thinking about it for a long time, and I  have decided to change the song which I am creating my music video for to BYOB by System of a Down - it's not the exact same genre as the punk rock song I was going to use, instead the band is an alternative, metal, rock band. The ideas I had for my music video are still the same, I am still going to do a paper puppet show, have Stevie as my main character (not as an artist) to show an innocent person who is shown a marxist view of our society and then choses to rebel against it, which makes her become dark and bad ass. I am still ngoing to use the shots from Little Swiss woods and I am still going to spray paint lyrics of the song on a brick wall in sychronisation to the song.

I have had issues to bring all of my actors together at once to play as a band - I also don't have the instruments and cannot borrow them all at once to be in the same room, so I have found a way to solve this issue by not having 'the band' actors playing altogether at once, but instead shoot them seperately playing their instruments/singing and edit the footage in a similar style to how Metallica's band members are portrayed in the music video Master of Puppets.

The Lyrics to the song I am going to use have a similar message to the message I wanted to convey in my music video to the other song I was going to do (Fuck Authority by Pennywise)

Here is the official music video for the song BYOB by System of a Down (SOAD)...

"B.Y.O.B." LYRICS

WHY DO THEY ALWAYS SEND THE POOR!
Barbarisms by Barbaras
With pointed heels.
Victorious, victories kneel.
For brand new spankin' deals.
Marching forward hypocritic
And hypnotic computers.
You depend on our protection,

Yet you feed us lies from the table cloth.
La la la la la la la la la,
Everybody's going to the party have a real good time.
Dancing in the desert blowing up the sunshine.

Kneeling roses disappearing,
Into Moses' dry mouth,
Breaking into Fort Knox,
Stealing our intentions,
Hangars sitting dripped in oil,
Crying FREEDOM!

Handed to obsoletion,
Still you feed us lies from the table cloth.
La la la la la la la la la,
Everybody's going to the party have a real good time.
Dancing in the desert blowing up the sunshine.
Everybody's going to the party have a real good time.
Dancing in the desert blowing up the sunshine.

Blast off, it's party time,
And we don't live in a fascist nation,
Blast off, it's party time,
And where the fuck are you?
Where the fuck are you?
Where the fuck are you?

Why don't presidents fight the war?
Why do they always send the poor?
Why don't presidents fight the war?
Why do they always send the poor? [X4]

Kneeling roses disappearing,
Into Moses' dry mouth,
Breaking into Fort Knox,
Stealing our intentions,
Hangars sitting dripped in oil,
Crying FREEDOM!

Handed to obsoletion,
Still you feed us lies from the tablecloth.
La la la la la la la la la,
Everybody's going to the party have a real good time.
Dancing in the desert blowing up the sunshine.
Everybody's going to the party have a real good time.
Dancing in the desert blowing up the sun

Where the fuck are you!
Where the fuck are you!

Why don't presidents fight the war?
Why do they always send the poor?
Why don't presidents fight the war?
Why do they always send the poor? [X3]
Why, do, they always send the poor [X3]
They only send the poor [x2]

Draft 1 of New Album Template

The images I used

For this (Front cover of album) I used an image from last year's AS Media work. This is my main model Stevie. I took this image last year for a perfume advertisement - the image you see on the left is what I edited on photoshop to be the on the advertisement. I have used this for my first draft because I have hardly any other images of her as I have not yet done a photo shoot for digipak work.

 

 

Here is another image of Stevie I took a few years ago when we were socialising at her home. Unfortunately I could only access the image through her old MySpace account, so it's very small. I will of course not be using this for my final album design, but it was a fantastic learning experience getting back on to Photoshop and experimenting with image manipulation styles. I will be doing something like this style for the left side insert image.

 

 

 

The back cover of the album's style is what I will be going for in my final result. I have used an image I took for last year's work (my magazine). This is an image of my friend Abi which I took in the green room and edited on Photoshop to make the pink appear. One of my ideas what to call my album is 'What Is Life?' - a rather philosophical name, I know, but the whole message my video is being created for is to portray rather serious issues in our society today (the right wing goverment and/or perhaps our country being at war against terrorists).

Second Time Filming

The second time filming, I had the idea to gather a few friends and go into the woods at Hessle Foreshore (Little Swiss) light a camp fire and pretend we're partying i.e. the bottle of vodka. I failed to remember to include close-up's and only managed to gather 3 friends (Paige, Ben and Emily) willing to act on that day for that scene of my music video - my main actor for example, Stevie, never seems to have any spare time. My idea now is to just choose another actor - my friend Paige comes to college with me and is in my media class so perhaps she would be a better option unless Stevie become available. I think I will have trouble including the people I filmed in the woods in the rest of my music video - one of the girls (Emily) is only a mutual friend so it would be hard to get ahold of her again. Although my friend Ben Dale may be up to being my lead singer. The singer of the song is male so I need to use a male actor to lip sync.

Album Cover Mock Up

I have a few different ideas and styles I would like to use for my magazine's album cover. I have made a mock up album cover on Photoshop from images I found on the internet which I would like my images my for my album cover to look like.

The main background image is from a PlayStation game called Grand Theft Auto San Andreas (the girl bending over with the sunglasses)-this type of image promotes sex, something that helps pieces of media sell quicker in my experience.

The two images I have edited into her sunglasses lenses are a random picture which came up when I Google image searched 'punk' (left image) and to the right is an edited image of Sid Vicious which I came across by the same search method.
I have played around with the main image and made its background match in a way. It has a colour scheme as you may notice the text is the same colour as the images. I decided to use a ransom note font because this is conventional for punk rock album covers to have. I found the font I used on the internet because I couldn't be bothered to create my own, I positioned the word 'bollocks' so it would collide with her mouth-a bit of humour as if to say she has bollocks in her mouth...
The font is from http://www.sean.co.uk/a/webdesign/freeransomfont.shtm

Changing the name of the band I have used for the music of my music video

So it seems I am obligated to change the band name from Pennywise so there's no copyright issues etc. So I've decided (after a few long thinking sessions) that I will call it S & M. This is for two reasons, the first a basic reason- my full name is Grace Samantha Moxon, which makes the band name simply two of my initials...the other reason is perhaps obvious to you- S & M in my experience is most commonly used as an abbreviation for sadism and masochism, in its simplest form it's slave and master.

The term from Wikipedia is 'Sadomasochism is the giving and/or receiving of pleasure—often sexual—from acts involving the infliction or reception of pain or humiliation. A subset of BDSM, practitioners of sadomasochism usually seek out sexual gratification from these acts, but often seek out other forms of pleasure as well. While the terms sadist and masochist specifically refer to one who either enjoys giving pain (sadist), or one who enjoys receiving pain (masochist), many practitioners of sadomasochism describe themselves as at least somewhat of a switch, or someone who can receive pleasure from either inflicting or receiving pain'.

In case this reference is not legitimate, I looked into another website from the google search engine from a site I hope has only facts. It's called YourDictionary. The link is: http://www.yourdictionary.com/s-m
 'S&M means sadism and masochism which is a practice of taking or causing abuse during sex. (noun) An example of S&M is one partner whipping another during intercourse.' It is stated below this information I have quoted that his information has been approved the Copyright Corporation LoveToKnow

Which means it's perfect! Punk music is in many ways an expression of  an extreme indivdual sub-culture. Punks are/were seen as freaks in society, so if it's a freak image they're beating onto the punks across the nation, why not blow their minds and rub it into their faces just like billy minsky said"'well if thats what they want then we'll give it to them!". Acting as a self-fulfilling prophecy while also sending that rock 'n' roll message of rebellion "Here I am, and fuck you if you can't understand me".
In the context of this music genre (rock) I have used the acronym S&M to represent a deviant sexual definition.

Digipak Template

I did some research on digipak templates, I thought it would be best for me to keep it simple-like many album layouts of the same genre of music as mine. I came across a website which offers free downloads of digipak templates. The template I have chosen is the 'CD Digi Pack - 2 Panel / 4 Page - 1 tray (Pocket to hold booklet).'
The link to the web address is http://www.ineedmedia.co.uk/duplication_and_replication_artwork_specifications/cd_and_dvd_digipak_templates/cd_and_dvd_digipak_templates.html
The information supplied about the digipak template I have chosen is '2 Panel/ 4 page Digi Pack - 1 Tray /1 pocket to hold 4/24 page booklet (118 x 118) - Finished: 139.5 x 125.5 x 7.5mm
Paper 330g - Printing: Ofset - Finish: Ultra Violet Gloss (Matt available on request) - (Matt available on request)
Tray: smooth black, white or transparent '
This website has supplied me with all of the accurate information I need to create this digipak. I need to keep in mind that any artwork text must be atleast 5mm away from the bleed edge(indicated by the dotted line), artwork for the underneath also needs to be created because the CD locator is transparent and artwork must be at least 300 dpi.

CHANGE OF PLAN

I have been advised to use one of the digipak templates which the college's course information (Moodle) includes. It gives a link to this webpage... http://www.discwizards.com/cd-dvd-artwork-templates.htm
Out of the options I have chosen the 6 panel digipak which stores 2 CD's. The template is much simpler to create because my course teachers will be able to help me with creating the design as they are familiar with these templates and it can contain more of my work.