evaluation

I was given a task to complete within a deadline, in this task I was told to create a Poster for a film of my choice, and was also asked to create a DVD sleeve of this, this took much effort and included many stages in order to present the finished poster and DVD sleeve.

First of all I started with my poster, and I aimed to get this poster to look as real as a professional poster, which you would see on a billboard, or on the side of a bus etc. I managed to achieve this by taking my time in creating the poster and putting a lot of effort into it. Also I also did some research into looking at different film posters, this then widened my knowledge and understanding of different codes and conventions of different text types and genre's.

I began to explore many different fonts and titles within my research, this helped me realise which font suited different types of genres for example I used a very bold pointy font to emphasize that the genre of my poster is a thriller. I used this font because it has a certain look to it, which kind of indicates a spirit. I also used red as the colour of this font, mainly because red has connotations of danger.
The title I chose is ‘triskaidekaphobia’ I chose this because my poster is about a board game with the number 13 in the middle, and that word means that you are scared of the number 13. The title is also short and snappy which means people will memorise it better.

Another thing I did was create a story synopsis, I created this in order to make it a little easier for myself to visualise what I am going to be creating, for example if I didn’t write a synopsis then I wouldn’t have included things like the board game in my poster, mainly because I wouldn’t have known what the poster would have been about.



Whilst being in the process of creating my film poster I produced a proposal. I did this in order to set out the scope as my project, if I didn’t have my proposal I wouldn’t of had any aim for my film poster, for example my age rating 18+ and many other things to do with my poster.

After creating my proposal I then started to make a paper design of my poster, I did this so I could give myself a good understanding of what it was going to look like, and also to experiment and see which version I liked best. Once I did the first one I then thought of more ideas and more designs I could include, and whilst in the process of doing these sketches I then worked up more ideas along the way and finally came up with my sketch I wanted to do on the computer. I found it easier to sketch my poster first because I wouldn’t then need to keep making changes to the version I would have done on the computer.

I then went onto my skills acquisition part, and learned a range of skills and techniques through doing a series of different things. One of the things I did was learn how to create an image manipulation I did this by using Photoshop, I was handed a picture of a girl with very oily skin and a few spots, and by the end of the session I had learnt how to make the girl look ‘perfect’, which was a handy skill to learn for my film poster.
I also created an illustrated image by using illustrator, I took a picture of myself inserted into illustrator and used many different tools to make myself look very cartoon like, which was also very handy to know when designing my film poster.
After doing them I had started to practice my photography which was to enable me to create better imagery, so when it came to taking photos for my poster I was comfortable and felt confident when doing it, therefore they would look convincing.



Anther stage which was also included in the process of creating my film poster was collecting different types of photographs for use in my poster, for example I had to take 5 different photos of people so I could insert them into my poster, and each person had to have a different expression. Without these photos my poster wouldn’t look realistic because these photos made my poster what it is.

An on going stage in the process of creating my film poster was my blog. Every time I updated my film poster or made changes to the poster I wrote about the different type of stages I used in order to keep me on top of what I was doing, and to also explain how I did things and how things worked. This was very important because without my blog I would have lost track of what stage I was at when creating my poster.

After doing all these stages I then created my DVD sleeve by doing most of the same stages but making my image smaller. I made it look as realistic as I could by including a title on the spine and a barcode with an age rating and many more realistic things, all I basically had to do was make my image smaller and insert a blurb on the back.

Within doing my film poster and DVD sleeve there was many different layout challenges, one of the challenges I had to overcome was creating a layout, which would be able to attract the audiences attention, this was done by using a memorable title ‘Triskaidekaphobia’ which is normally always places at the top of the page in order to be eye catching.

Graphics on a mac first printing

This is my first attempt of my article for 'Graphics on a Macintosh', which is about how i created my film poster and my animated image. On this blog post i will be explaining how i did certain things to make it look more like it has been done in an article format, and i will also be proof reading my article to make sure every aspect of it is correct. 

    Before opening Adobe Illustrator I started to write my article up by just using blogger, the reason i did this was because i thought it would be easier to write it up without a layout rather than worrying about spacing and setting it out right.

After finishing writing my article up i then opened the software Adobe Illustrator to start creating the layout of my article, I set the settings to create a page with 3 columns to give it a look of a magazine article or a newspaper article, I then added how many pages i wanted which was 5 i did this by clicking on insert and "new page", The five pages was more than enough and i was left with a bit of writing on the last page which didn't look right, that meant i then had to fill my space by enlarging my finished images across 2 pages to make it look more filled. 

After doing that i added a title 'Graphics on a Macintosh' i spread this right across the pages of my article in a bold font which i also made rather large. I did this so it would stand out and also make the page look more in an article format, as you can see on the image above.

When i had done that i then went onto my word document which i had already done and saved all the pictures and screenshots that i had used into there own folder. I did this because it would then be easy to just open the folder and drag the pictures onto my page layout.

After setting my page out to the appropriate format and inserting my main title i then started to insert all the text what i had already prepared on word, but before i started inserting the text i had to insert text box's to the size of the columns and then copy and pasted all my text into the columns, when doing this there was a little green box at the bottom what held all the text to get it onto the new column i clicked that and it spilled out across each of the columns making it look more professional. 

After adding all the text into my columns I looked at the article which i wrote on word and looked at which text went with which pictures, after doing that i chose a few pictures which i thought was appropriate and added them onto this article scattered out quite a bit. i did this by dragging the images out of a folder on my desktop onto the page of my article,

The pictures and screenshots i chose to upload onto my article are very important within this piece of work for many reasons. Because the article is intended to target the audience that are unaware of the software they are put in place to help the viewers get a better understanding along with text to also explain how to do particular things on the software.

When the pictures were uploaded it then changed the layout of the text, and put different things in different places, for example the text didn't match the picture that had been uploaded, so that meant i had to go through the whole of the article to fit all the text to match the picture. I had to do this because if the reader was to see the image with the text not matching then it wouldn't make any sense, and it wouldn't make it any easier to learn how to use this software.

When all the text and pictures were put in place i was left with one half filled column on another page and then realized that i had to do something with the half filled column because it didn't look professional like an article should do, when i noticed this i then made my final finished images larger and put them across the 2 pages and all column's to fill in the extra space, as you can see above.

The final thing i had to add to my article was prices of the software's i used to create the poster and the cartoon like image, to do this i went online on the official Adobe site and looked up prices per month on how much it was to have which was £26. When i found this i then went on Google images and got the logo of the two software's i used and placed them next to where i put the information about the prices.
Another thing i also did was include a link to my blog which includes more images and information on how to use the two software's, just for the people that need more information the link was
http://emilyvalegraphics.blogspot.co.uk

That concludes the long drawn out process of creating my own article and making it look more professional than just as a word document.