Step to step process of First front cover draft

This is a step to step process power-point of the creation of my first draft of my music magazine. This features screen dumps from every stage of the process along with a detailed explanation of how I created it.

Fifth Front Cover Draft

This is my fifth draft. As you can tell, this is extremely similar to my first draft and most of my other drafts have consisted of experimentation with different themes and looks for my music magazine, but as I haven't found this to have worked. I have gone back to my original draft as I feel this looks the most professional and it represents my genre perfectly, especially with the background. The main changes I have made from my first draft to this is some of the font sizing and positioning of the headline and features. This shows I am capable of putting a lot of effort into my first draft and shows that as I work hard on drafts, not as many will be required in the future. Obviously, this one is still a draft so when I get some peer feedback for this I was make some changes to it before submitting my final draft.

Fourth Front Cover Draft

This the fourth draft of my music magazine. The significant difference from my last draft is that I reassembled the background previously used in my first and second draft. Like mentioned earlier, I did this because I felt the background was part of the magazine in a way that it contributed to the colour scheme and less features are needed if a great background is used as this the magazine much more depth, along with distinctively showing what genre of music my magazine is just by looking at it. I feel that adding more features will overwhelm the magazine cover and make it look very crowded and busy. Whereas the use of the background and less features makes the magazine very simple and elegant, which is what I'm aiming for with my magazine. The other significance is the new masthead, I added this in just for a test to see if this looked any better than the less. But now I have decided to change it back to my old masthead as I feel this masthead doesn't match the genre of music magazine as it looks more Rock/Punk due to the distorting design of it, rather than country.

Third Front Cover Draft

This is the third draft of my music magazine. The most significant difference I have made with this draft from my previous ones is the omission of the background. Since my first draft, I have used a background of a countryside that fits in with the photograph of the model and it distinctively showed what genre of music the magazine is based on. With this draft, I was curious to see what it would look like if I removed it and replaced it with a plain, white backdrop. I did this, and overall I am not particularly pleased with the outcome. The main reason being that the headline and features do not match. This is because the colours were mostly inspired by the background and not the model (with the exception of the light red from her lipstick) as I chose the outfit to compliment the backdrop I would be adding later on, as her outfit is very simple with not much colour. I know now, that a white background should only be used if the model's outfit or look contains at least 3 colours as they can be used for the colour scheme. Other changes I made to this draft was the sizing of the headline and features, I made them bigger than the previous draft but smaller than the first draft. I also changed the headline quote back to middle alignment as I felt this looked better and complimented the rest of the headline. 

Second Front Cover Draft

This is my second draft of my music magazine. The most significant difference I have made with this draft was my experimentation with different images to use for the main image for my music magazine. I chose this image as it is completely different to my other image in my previous draft. As this one is a medium-long shot and the previous one was a close up. Other differences I mad to this draft was making some of the featureless smaller as I felt they took up too much space in the previous draft. Overall, this draft has made me realize that using a medium-long shot was a bad idea as it gives the cover too much empty space and it just looks messy. Making the text smaller didn't help this either as it contributes to leaving more empty space. When making my third draft, I will change the photo back to the previous one to avoid the problem of too much empty space.

First Front Cover Draft

This is my first draft. Overall, I am extremely pleased with it as it conveys exactly what I visioned earlier on the the process of pre-production. For improvements for my next drafts, I feel that I could have spaced out my features a lot more and possibly rearrange them so they aren't interfering with the main image.

I took inspiration from this cover of Rolling Stone in many different ways;
The first being that I used a similar type of positioning for the masthead. I made sure it was at the top middle of the page with a bit being covered up by the model's head. I felt this compliments the cover the most as it fits in well with the page while a different position of the masthead would only make it look out of place.
I also used a similar idea as the small "The 2012 Hot List" feature. I liked this so much on the Rolling Stone magazine cover that I decided to create my own on Photoshop and put it on my magazine cover. Even though Rolling Stone is not a country magazine, I still felt this feature was just as appropriate to have on my magazine cover.

Country album covers: Inspiration and analysis

To further research into my chosen genre of country music for my magazine. I decided to choose a variety of album covers from current and established country artists. I analyse them briefly and pick out any conventions I have picked up that all of these covers share, which will help when I come to having my photo shoot for my double page spread.

Acoustic reader profile

Even though I have stated my target audience many times in the process of creating my magazine. I decided to take this one step further and create a reader profile for my music magazine. This way you can tell what age and gender readers are, as well as some facts on the average reader for Acoustic.

Behind the Scenes: Front cover photoshoot

This is my completed behind the scenes video for my front cover photoshoot for my music magazine. One of my friends volunteered to film it and she did using my Flip Ultra HD camcorder. I edited this footage using Adobe Premiere Pro, editing was a short process as a whole as I only created titles, sped up and slowed down footage, put a song in the backgound, added transitions and also added a few little effects here and there.

The song I used in the background is "Summerlong" by Kathleen Edwards, one of the artists that inspired to theme and genre of my music magazine (see below for fully study of her). Ultimately, the song was too long to use with my footage as the song is originally 4 minutes and 5 seconds long. To make this song fit with the footage without having to change the song completely, I sped up the song by another 2% which changed the duration to a good 3 minutes and 44 seconds which fit with the footage perfectly. By only speeding it up by 2% was also effective in the sense as it still sounded very similar to the original and wasn't unrecognizable like the song is when you speed it up over another 5%.

The video took a good 30 minutes to encode before publishing. Once this was complete, I watched my video only to notice that the logo of my music magazine had not appeared on the first title, instead it just says "logo". As I didn't have time to solve this issue and encode the video again, I decided to deal with this issue and just address it like I am now.

This is what the logo should have looked like:

This is also the masthead I'm planning to use for my music magazine.

Overall, I am very pleased with my behind the scenes video, aside from that one small problem. I took inspiration from the Vogue behind the scenes video shown earlier in the sense that there were titles at the beginning with the artist's name and footage with music in the background. As for improvements I would have liked to take the inspiration even further by interviewing my artist and interweaving that with the behind the scenes footage, as this was done in the Vogue behind the scenes video.

Front cover images

This prezi contains all of the images I took for the front page of my magazine. I have split them in 3 categories to make them easier to analyse; best, worst and other. 

The pictures in the "best" category are all images that I consider to be the best. This is due to the great angles, good focus and good quality of lighting. These are all pictures that I may use for my front cover.

The pictures in the "worst" category are all images I consider to be the worst. This is due to bad lighting, blurriness and bad angles. It is very rare that I may use any of these images for my front cover.

The pictures in the "other" category are all images that are not good nor bad. They are good images but not good enough to be considered "the best". Overall, these images do have very good lighting and focus, but some of their angles mean that it will be unlikely that I will use any of these images.

Behind the scenes video inspiration

The video above is my inspiration for my behind the scenes video of my photo-shoot for my magazine front cover. I will be editing the videos my camera operator took and editing them in the same style, with captions, change of speed duration and music playing in the background, which suits the genre of music my magazine is based around.

Country music genre

Even though I specified my main music genre for my magazine a while back, I thought I'd explain it in some more detail:

It began in the rural regions of the Southern United States in the 1920s. It takes its roots from southeastern American folk music, Western cowboy. Blues mode has been used extensively throughout its recorded history. Country music often consists of ballads and dance tunes with generally simple forms and harmonies accompanied by mostly string instruments such as banjos, electric and acoustic guitars, fiddles, and harmonicas.

The first main country artist was Jimmie Rodgers, who rose to fame in the 1920s. He was a spark which eventually set off a big popularity in country music. The "Golden Age" of Country music was considered to be the 60's, 70's and 80's. With artists like Lynn Anderson and Dolly Parton. "Country Pop" was also established during this time as a new sub-genre of country music, this is the most popular country sub-genre today with classic and modern artists like The Dixie Chicks, Faith Hill, Tim McGraw, Shania Twain, Taylor Swift, Carrie Underwood, Brad Paisley, Miranda Lambert and Hunter Hayes.

Nashville, Tennessee, is considered to be the "birthplace" and "capital" of the country music genre as many of the big country artists were discovered there and it is the home of most country music record labels. The city also holds the Country Music Hall of Fame.

Pictures:
Top middle: Stereotype of country music
Top right: Nashville skyline
Middle right: Country music hall of fame

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Country_music

Kathleen Edwards

The image above is of Canadian country and folk artist, Kathleen Edwards. Aside from Taylor Swift and Carrie Underwood, she is my other source of inspiration due to her unique style of music and appearance. Unlike Taylor and Carrie, Kathleen is a much less mainstream artist as she is not very well known, incredibly underrated in my opinion. Her music is also very different as it ranges from alternative country to folk, whereas most country music singers just stick with the trademark country or pop. This shows Kathleen is much more divergent as she isn't afraid to explore other genres of music to build up her repertoire. Kathleen's anti-mainstream music, unique style and diversity has helped her become one of my favourite artists. Kathleen has four albums out to date (with the latest released in 2012). and has a recording career of over 10 years. Compared to the other two country artists that I mentioned, Kathleen is much more mature with her music which means it appeals to late teens as well as middle-aged women.

Current Music Chart Analysis

I decided to identify the current UK top 10 chart for the week beginning the 9th of December. Before looking, I predicted that the top 10 would mostly be Pop with some R&B. But I discovered some things that I wasn't expecting at all. It shocked me to find an Indie/Folk song at No1, as this isn't very common at all. I was expecting a Pop song which explains within itself is that the contemporary music charts are dominated with Pop music. I do expect though that next week's No1 will be the single from the latest winner of The X Factor, which will be a Pop song. Another thing that surprised me on the chart was to find a Funk song at No2, this is just as uncommon as having an Indie or folk song this far up in the chart, as Pop dominates most of the charts. The last thing for me that was having a K-Pop song in the top 10. Obviously, Gangnam style has been wildly popular internationally, being the most viewed and most liked video on Youtube and holds the record for the first K-Pop song to reach No1 in the UK. This is even more uncommon as K-Pop music only seems to be popular in its native continent of Asia. As it is in a different language, it is unusual and rare for a K-Pop to get this popular.

I created a pie chart containing this information in Microsoft Excel to further prove my statement that pop dominates the current charts.

Masthead font styles

While in the process of choosing the font for my masthead of my music magazine, I looked at Dafont.com due to the large amount of fonts on the site. I chose a wide variety of fonts which are pictured above before choosing my final font. My idea for my masthead was a very western and distorted style which fitted perfectly with the genre of my magazine, country. Back while I was choosing the masthead, I had decided that the name of my magazine would be country, but I felt this was too specific and cliche for the genre. So I eventually went with 'Acoustic' as it is a characteristic of country music, which makes it relate to the genre without being too specific.