Looking back on year 12 and my work in AS media i am confident going in to year 13 and the A2 media course, I have some work I am proud of from AS such as my music magazine, this was our main task for the course and the most exciting, I really enjoyed this because it gave me a chance to be creative and really explore different features and formats of media like Indesign, Photoshop and other editing software platforms. It also introduced me as to how to use a green screen and edit green screen images, I found this all very intriguing and interesting. Everybody chose one genre for their music magazine, I chosen Alternative Rock for mine as that is my favourite genre of music so I looked at other alternative rock music magazines like kerang and NME etc. for inspiration and I came across a magazine front cover of one of my favourite bands the Stone Roses from an NME magazine it was an image of Ian Brown with members of other Manchester bands behind him, this was the inspiration for my magazines front cover, once I seen this i was hooked on it.
This is the front cover Ian Brown from the stone roses centre and Bez and Sean Ryder from the happy mondays faded in the background to the right and left of the Stone roses frontman.
This was my final magazine front cover, fair to say I got close to what i wanted, I called my magazine Iconic rock because something that one of my favourite bands the stone roses say all the time is that they are iconic so i thought it fitted right with them being an alternative band and my magazine being an alternative music magazine. This was edited using photoshop at first and then moved onto indesign, I am really proud of this work because I think I got really close to what I was going for and I am proud of being able to edit in the way I did, the photo shoot was done in a green screen room.We had to produce 3 pages for our magazine, a front cover, a contents page and a double page spread.
I was very pleased with this, my contents page as it meets all the codes and conventions for an average contents page, it can direct people as to where everything is e.g what page everything is on and whats on what page. There are two images on this page, one of them from a gig I went to, my brothers mates band played in studio 2 and they are the main focus for my Double page spread as I got to interview my brothers mate who is the lead guitarist and singer, the second image is of a concert I went too in Manchester on the 15th of December 2016, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, who are my favourite band, I have mentioned them in the contents page and on the front cover, this is why I put the picture in here, all the photos I have taken myself from my phone, the contents page was created and edited using Indesign.
This is a picture of my Double page spread, I was also very happy with this because again it showed off my use of Indesign and that I am capable of using it. I feel like my double page spread stood out to everyone else's because where everyone else chose to make up their own fake interview with a fake name of a fake singer/band, I actually got a real local band to do an interview with me for my Double page spread, 2 of my brothers friends are in a band together, they're called Damsels and they are an alternative rock band so really it was a golden opportunity for me to interview them, the lead singer, my brothers good friend Greg gave me some really good in detail answers for my interview, I also fitted in some images from one of their gigs that I went too, again all the images were taken from my own phone, I was really proud of my double page spread and I think it was a really good creative idea from me to do a real interview with a real band and made my double page spread stand out.Overall I really enjoyed the freedom and creativity we were allowed for this project and it really helped me grow as a media student, this was by far my favourite part of the year.
Another part of the year I really enjoyed was our visit to media city in Solford, greater Manchester it was a really eye opening experience as to how the world of media works, we got to see the BBC studios, ITV studios and a few others. We got to go and see where match of the day is filmed at BBC sport, it was also on transfer deadline day so we got to keep up to date on what was going on in football, we also got to see where judge rinder gets filmed and where countdown gets filmed, we got to see the studios that big companies have to work with, its litteraly a big space, everything has to be done by the shows production crew from scratch. We also got to see the radio stations, where most of BBCs radio shows are broadcasted from, we got to see what they have to work with and how it works when theyre interviewing people in the radio room and where bands have played live in the studio, our tour guide told us the biggest band they ever had on the show was Arctic Monkeys, in that particular studio.
These are two pictures i took from the studio .We then got took to where BBC breakfast is filmed, I couldn't believe how small it was, it looks really big on the televison but in reality its tiny, the reporters have a hard job, theyre always wearing an earpiece and have people constantly talking in their ear, not even neccisarly to them, they just have to block out everything until they hear theyre name and the text they have to read is either under the glass table or in the camera, the weather man/woman has the hardest job though, all of us had a go of doing that and it was a real challenge.
These were my two favourite parts of my Media AS level, I also feel I done really well in my exam.
Now I am looking forward to year 13 and my A2, I am especially looking forward to my summer project of making my own music video, the music video I have chosen is the Red Hot Chili Peppers song Dani California, it is very abstract and different, it is also one of the best music videos of all time and I am really looking forward to starting it and I have already started planning for it, I have my cast and I am ready to start recording any day now. The video explores all the different eras of rock music, rockabilly, the British Invasion, Psychedelia, glam, punk, hair metal, and grunge, since this video rock has evolved even more, so I have decided to put my own twist on it with the eras Ive already mentioned but also including Madchester , Britpop, Indie and adult alternative.
In the Dani California music video the band imitate people from all the eras e.g the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Elvis and Kurt Cobain, i will include all of these but also include the stone roses, oasis, the killers and arctic monkeys etc. If I cant do this, my backup video is Nirvana's smells like teen spirit.
The music video was directed by Mark Romanek, the video is pretty ,much just all 4 members of the band doing random weird things throughout, the image above is just 3 John Fruciante's in a wheely bin singing other parts of the video include all of the band trying to balance buckets on their heads. The video begins with the camera zooming in through a yellow tube, at the end of the tube is Anthony Kiedis in glasses singing the lyrics of the song. The inspiration for the video was an Austrian artist called Erwin Wurm a particular piece by the artist was the main influence and that was his one minute sculptures hence why the band are preforming random scenes with no meaning or purpose, thats sort of their style in general they're just weird.
The next the band imitate is the Jimi Hendrix experience falling under the psychedelia era.
