Reflection print
- 2. Research • My Research Was good because it had a wide variety of different topics with in fanzines so I had one on life decisions and what the author thought on them and then I had one on video games from the 2000’ and then I had yet another one Greek Mythology and the gods. I also did fairly in depth analysis of each, from colour to layout. • I also did quite a good audience profile doing both a primary and secondary audience as a backup and going into some detail about why they might enjoy the product and what type of backgrounds they may be coming from and same goes for gender and age. • I believe that my research summary was fairly clear and mostly concise taking from the rest of my research including the two areas being production techniques and what interests people in fanzines.
- 3. Research part 2 • My research had some down sides to it because of the slide called what interests people in fanzines most of which was made up from just looking at what fanzines were like and looking at sales for different fanzines to come up with some sort of idea of what was going to happen. • The other major down side to my planning was that I didn’t do any primary research because I didn’t think that it would aid my project at all in fact if I gave them anyone an option in what I was going to create they would probably ask it to be something completely different to what I wanted to make. • The other quite big down side was that I believe that I could have gone into much more detail on what little research I actually did and that it may have needed to have been fleshed out a bit more.
- 4. Planning • I believe that my idea generation was quite strong as it has looked towards most of the details that I was going to include in my fanzines, those ideas including the writing, the images, the backgrounds and the questions I would try to raise and for every idea generation I made a mind map to compliment it and there were three idea generations. • As with the idea generations I had three different mood boards one for each idea one being for Greek mythology, one for video games and another for art and for all of these mood boards there were three different mood board analysis which was fairly broad as it didn’t look to much into context however it looked into the base designs of the products and gave me some more general ideas for how I could produce different parts of my product. • The pagination was all right because gave me the stepping stones that I needed to get to my final product. • The production schedule was fairly similar to the pagination it was useful in the way that it gave me ideas on where to start and how to start but beyond that it didn’t tell me much else that means I probably should have added some more work into both the production schedule and the pagination.
- 5. Planning part 2 • My idea generation could have been seen as being weak because as far as I can see when I look back over them two of the ideas seemed half baked and had quite a bit missing from the general idea, but one was quite strong compared to the other two making the choice quite obvious from the get go and the mood board was pitiful which actually shows how much planning and research went into this part of the project. • When it comes down to my idea development mood board analysis could have used some more on what the context could have been for the specific products. • When it comes down to the pagination it was useful to give me a jump start however past that it wasn’t of much use because when I started to create my pages I thought that around 300 words would fit into one page when it was closer to 300 characters and so I had to have two full pages of writing and then have the images on separate pages. • As for the production schedule it was the same as the pagination because in the end as the pagination changed my production schedule changed at the same time prolonging the process.
- 6. Fanzine • I like the fanzine as it is technically what I set out to create with in a limited time period and it is in perfect A5 size. It is fairly basic because I had to cut back on bits and pieces I was going to put into the fanzine, I cut most of the bits out when it comes down to the writing same goes for both the exclusives and the reviews. As I have shown I received some massive answers when it came down to the reviews I also wrote down quite a bit even though I had cut out quite a lot and also the designs were fairly basic but the way that I drew them it looked better being black and white rather than in colour and yes I did try it I just forgot to save the trials and errors a majority of the time. I like that I used a wide variety in some of the images that I decided to draw though and when they were coloured they did look much better in certain cases. • Quite a few of the images like the dead cells image is incredibly detailed and same goes for the pokemon map, the rainbow six siege images and the Assassin’s Creed images. • The writing sticks out well when it comes down to the black part of the background which was lazily made but looks alright however the writing does not stick out as well when it comes down to the blue part of the background maybe if I changed the shade or colour it would stand out more.
- 7. Fanzine part 2 • When I look back at it, it looks incredibly rushed same goes for the majority of this project, it also seems like there is very little detail when it comes down to both the designs and the writing aspects of this project. • Some of the writing doesn’t stick out to well when it comes down to the blue on blue so I need to be able to change up the colour of my writing. • Or I could just change the background which would have been easier but then what would I change it to it would probably either have been grey or white, which wouldn’t really do to much for the design of the background and would just seem slightly lazier than it already was. • When it comes down to some of the designs they aren’t coloured quite a large reason behind this choice was because it didn’t look good with the block colouring that I usually use
- 8. Time management • My time management was all right up until the Christmas holidays when I started to fall behind because became ill over that time I tried to work through it and it eventually got worse and worse so I had to take a break from working on my project for a little while. • When it came down to my research it only took a fairly short amount of time because I was fairly confident with what I wanted to create and thus kind of ignored to an extent primary research as it wouldn’t do much for my project anyway and when it came down to creating a proposal I took the short and easy way out which was to do the rationale and the idea as well as the name but beyond that there was no detail making it harder to complete the project how I wanted it to be. • The planning was done quite well for how much of it there actually was I did it all in good time that good amount of time that I actually started on my production a week early which made the production a little bit easier to manage, with the mood boards or the analysis’ not taking long at all. • When it came down to the production I slowed down a bit when I had to the reviews, exclusives and interviews and when it came down to the designs at the start I was at least making 2-3 designs a week but then Christmas holiday came along and what I mentioned at the start happened, only when I came back was when I actually finished my production and uploaded it which was about a day or two maybe over the deadline.
- 9. Audience appeal • The audience would have liked because it was made by a person like them and it was made for similar people to be able to check out some older games and some more recent ones at the same time so it kind of developed into a list of games that I would recommend playing except for the Pokémon game as I haven’t played it. My product also appealed to my audience by using some more dark colours than light colours when it came down to the background of the writing which was also incredibly simple and nice to look at. When it comes down to gender though I believe that it could have appealed to either side this because I tried to appeal to both sides at the same time. When it comes down to the age it was bright in some areas and dark in others meaning that I thought I made a good contrast between the two to entice some more people to try the fanzine. When I think about the class I never really tried to appeal to the classes with either a price or anything else to even come close about trying to entice anyone from middle class, lower class and upper class.
- 10. Peer Feedback Positives • Overall your style seems to stay consistent over the production for your ideas • The inspired pieces of work talking about Assassins Creed and Rainbow Six Siege are impressive. • The review work on for Dead Cells and Pokémon are detailed and for someone looking at the games, this would be handy to determine whether it would good to buy the game. Negative I feel that it is lacking in the amount of games that you have looked at as well as the content looking at each, I felt that if you were to keep the 3 games you could have gone into more detail and broken it down into sub categories like aesthetics, story and gameplay. Some of the designs that you have done to represent the games feel incomplete, in the case of the Pokémon designs is just a layout issue where the characters would have been nicer if they were aligned to the center horizontally of the page and evenly vertically across the page Improvements I believe that the colour scheme/ design chosen, while it is mellow the blue seems to contrast a little too harshly against the black, a way to fix this would have been to blur around it so that it blends with the black a bit more.
- 11. Peer Feedback Pros: • Art provides a nice sense of individuality. • The mixture of line-based artwork and coloured ones provides a good contrast between them. • Written content is detailed and provides a range of appropriate viewpoints. Cons: • Colour scheme feels a little hard to read. • I think that the text would benefit from using different fonts to separate headings from paragraphs. • Page numbers referring to images feel un-required and seem to take up space on the index page.
- 12. Feedback Summary • I agree that the style stays consistent throughout the fanzine and that there is a lot of good art work and writing work however I also agree that I probably should have done some more detail for each of the games I looked at. Also there is an issue with the colour scheme in the background that it contrasts a little bit too harshly and also that the text could have been in a different font or changed in some way to separate the bunch. However I there was on little detail that I both agree with and disagree with which was when the first feedback talked about the images being incomplete the map was complete and I tried to colour it in however it just just wasn’t looking nice at all so I just reverted it to its original state and when came down to the Pokémon drawings I will accept that those drawings were half baked and that they either needed a background to link them together or to have more Pokémon in the image.