Campaign Unit - Photography

We are in the early stages of our project at the moment and everyone is at different levels of the task. Such as, I am only in the process of sketching my idea of what the leaflet we are going to create should look like. To come up with ideas for this, in my group, we discussed various possibilities of what the leaflet would look like, that would contribute to our final piece .
So I think a break away from the computers was good because it gave us a chance to re-think about our contributions to the unit. We thought about our picture and the way we could work them into our final product. In our group we discussed angles and positioning which might be inviting to the target audience.
Here's some examples of my work take today using a digital, mega pixel camera;
This picture shows particular sweets such as love hearts, skittles, parma-violets, Fruit pastels and in the boxes are various toppings. This photograph is relevant to our leaflet because it informs the reader about some of the choices of flavours available. The dynamics of this photograph and the way the sweets are stacked, as well as the angle of the camera, grabs the readers attention and draws them into the picture.
The photo could be used along side this photo as they both inform the reader of available flavours: I also took some pictures of the outside of the shop because Chris ( the manager) wanted us to make sure theperson reading the leaflet new what his shop looked like if they had never heard of Shakin' Moo's before. When we had finished taking our pictures we returned to Parkside to upload them on to the computer. We then had to modify our pictures, deciding whethere or not to make them lighter of darker or whether the colour scheme needed to be changed for example the picture below is the one above, however, it has been modified by changing the colour scheme:

I decided against using this photograph because I didn't think it was very self explanitory. I thought that I didn't comply with what Chris wanted on his leaflet.

Hi Hannah

This is going really well! Continue to be reflective in your commentary and also try to include some "because" bits as well ie WHY did you think things and make decisions?

Shakin' Moo's Project

Today I was based at Parkside. We, as a class, spent most of the day being briefed about our assignment we will be working on over the next few weeks. We have started a new project called The Shakin' Moo project which is basically about designing advertisement for this company. In the morning we went to talk to the founder of Shakin' Moo's - Chris Lane. He told us that the culture of his business was very important to him and without culture there is no buisness for Shakin' Moo's. He explained to us that we had two options to choose from when designing his advertisment. 1) A flyer, because he wanted a new innovative campaign that customers would read and instantly get the vibe that Chris trys to portray through his shops personality. 2) A facebook page - because it targets young people who find social networking sites interesting. I thought that making a facebook page would be a major setback because it wouldnt appeal to the people Chris was targeting his market at. I found that because Chris wanted his advertisement to appeal to Primark shoppers and teens that a leaflet was the best aproach to a shopper who won't have acssess to the internet whilst shopping. Later on back at Parkside Campus, we went through what Chris had told us and sorted out what we where doing. I found this part of the day relativley easy because I understood what was going on and what I had to do. We then where split into groups. I was put with Emily & Bex. In our groups we had to discuss our campaign and what extra we wanted to do for our client. We decided to use our Happy Hour idea because it would appeal to people after a long day or simply for fun in general. We thought this would be a good idea because of the recession and it would appeal to shoppers who are looking for another bargain after going into shops like Primark.

Shakin' Moos offers over 180 different flavours for milkshakes; and with people who want a quick decision when they walk into a shop we created a 'Try B4 U Buy' idea. People who are deciding on a flavour for a milkshake might see a flavour and want to what it tastes like such as: marmite. This could increase Chris's profit. So we as a group thought of this idea. However people can take advantage of freebies so we thought that a cheap pricing range would be suitable to stop things like free tasters being taken advantage of. We thought that twenty pence seemed like a reasonable price because if it costs around thirty-five pence per scoop of ice-cream he wouldn't be loosing out of profits as well as keepin non-customers at bay. Within the group I contributed towards the idea f the 'Try B4 U Buy' idea. I came up with the name of the idea . I thought that by using 'teenage language' it would appeal to people of the target audience (13-17 years old preferably). I thought that me , emily & bex worked well in a group and we had lots of good ideas. Next time we could try to work in a more open way and to try and encourage each other to speak and for ideas.

Hi Hannah

Nice work! Lots of detail and reflective commentary, well done! I actually think your Photoshop skills are fairly strong and you produced a very strong piece of work.

Reflective: Homework:

Today I spent most of the day finishing and tweaking the 'Choc de more' project leaflet that me and Rebecca created at the begining of this module. Unfortunately Rebecca wasn't there, this made the work tricky for me because I found it very difficult to fully grasp the skills needed to use the tools provided in the program Photo-shop as well as to avoid typographical errors; For example, when I was finishing the leaflet I needed to add text to it so as to make what we where about and what we where selling clear; I needed to ask for help allot when inserting pictures as well. I found asking for help very rewarding because I could go back, if I had made the same mistake again, such as inserting pictures, and solve the problem on my own. From asking I learnt how to use and create different layers, change colours and insert text. I found it very satisfying to do that on my own. I found it helpful to use the crop tool when editing pictures and text size when tweaking the leaflet to get everything to fit on, look nice and to look presentable.

This is my finished product

Overall, I think completing and tweaking my leaflet was successful because I learnt new skills and applied them to this piece of work. I worked hard on trying to come up with slogans and meal deals to suit the leaflet and I think that it was time well spent. Next as an individual task to exercise and develop our skills as a class using Photo-shop we had to take a picture of anything we wanted and make it into a poster of some sort as if we where selling the image to the public. At this point I had started working with Kimberly who had just joined the CRAM group. We had took a picture of a car. This is the starting picture:

As you can see, in this picture there are allot of things that stand out. Such as the side of another car just peeking in , the background and in the corner the sun is caught on the lens creating rays of light across the top of the picture. We decided to get rid of the car in the bottom left hand corner because we saw it as an obstruction in the picture. However this was tricky because it meant getting rid of some of the main car we where focusing on as this picture shows:

Compared to the first picture, you can see that by using the cropping tool in photo-shop you can get rid of the obstruction, however it cuts off some of the selling point, which is problematic because the focus/selling point is the car. As shown by this picture:

This picture shows the main selling point which we where trying to focus on from the beginning. We decided to run with the rays of sun running along the top of the picture for effect, as to make it look brand new and appealing to the audience. We used a tool called curves to darken and lighten the picture and create a brighter edge so as to make the audience's eye steer directly onto the selling point. i.e. the car. This is shown in this picture:

I think the effect used works really well and creates an angelic atmosphere around the car making it stand out and noticeable to an audience. We then wanted to make it seem brand new and perfect for anyone looking to buy a new car. We did this by using a tool called 'solar' which created rings of sun light around a certain area of the car making it seem just how we wanted it. This made the work easier on us because we got the result we wanted. As shown In our final picture:

I'm very pleased with the way our final picture turned out, however I think we could have worked on the background of the picture because the setting isn't right for a promotional picture; unfortunately we had run out of time before we could have changed it. Personally, I have been pleased today by how I have worked and developed my skills in learning how to use Photo-shop more efficiently. I think I have also used my initiative because I asked for help when I didn't understand something. This helped me when I had made the same mistake again. I think I need to put a little more effort into understanding the programs I am using such as Photo-shop. I also need to contribute more in lessons to progress in the task that I have been given, rather than to let somebody else answer questions, such as when we are doing group discussions.

Project Earth

We started a new topic called 'Save The Planet' today in which we had to design an advertisement campaign for it. This was hard for me because I didn't find environmental problems interesting and coming up with ideas for it was hard - such as global warming, pollution etc. I decided to do a list of all the environmental problems I could think of and decided to run with Global Warming. I decided to use polar bears because I thought they would be the first to be affected by it.

To create the poster I had to look for two pictures;

One of Humans on ice

and one for Polar bears.

The original idea was to merge the two pictures together and put a single caption on it, such as 'are we so different?' but I decided against the idea of the caption because it sent the wrong message to the reader. We used the program photo shop to create our advertisement but it was difficult for me to merge the pictures together so I decided to put red swirls into the middle of the pictures and around the edges to symbolise that global warming is closing in fast. The purpose of the two humans standing on the ice like the polar bears is to symbolise that our habitat, like thiere's, will soon disappear if we don't do something. When your actually doing a save the planet leaflet you really learn that through your own research and everything that we do really need to save the planet and that's one of the main things I learnt in that lesson.

This is the final Product:

15th Thursday - Fitz & Graveyard

Over the past few weeks I have really enjoyed what we have done, from learning how to use a video camera properly to vox-pops and making short films. At the beginning of the course I was shy towards the members of the group but I feel I have improved since then. I'm enjoying the photography topic we are doing because there are things about how to make a picture look good that I didn't know before. We also get a lot of freedom for instance when we went to the Fitzwilliam museum; it was great to get out of the class room and see actual artwork instead of looking at it on the web. In the Fitz I learnt to look t paintings with more depth to try and find things I wouldn't have noticed before going there with the class - such as angles in paintings. When we went to the graveyard on Mill Rd to take pictures at funny angles and different perspectives I found it really inspirational because there where some lovely graves dating back all the way to the titanic. I learnt some really useful tips when we did the graveyard task, such as you can take a pic of anything but put some framing in it or put it at an angle with perspective and it becomes something really different and interesting. Unfortunately I felt a bit uncomfortable and a bit disrespectful taking pictures in graveyard however it was a really good experience.

Playgirls Campeign Created

This morning we where split into two groups. A photography group run by Mr.Hind and a film group run by Mr.Durran. I was put into Mr.Hinds group I didn't mind but I would have preferred to be in film...until I found out what we where doing. We started a new topic called 'Campaign'. This involves creating advertisement for a certain company.
To start off the topic we where set a quick task; we had ten seconds to choose a plumber from the yellow pages - our scenario was, our house was flooded and we needed an emergency plumber. I didn't find the task too difficult because it was only a warm up and I think I acted quickly under the pressure of finding something in so little a time. After everyone had chosen we talked about why we chose the plumbers we chose. This helped me understand that you have to have an eye catching and relevant advertisement piece, to appeal to a potential customer.
After that we started on our new project; we split into teams and gave our team a name. There are only two people in my team - my self and a girl named Rebbecca. We named our team The Playgirls (just for fun) . I think I will work well with rebbecca because she seems very nice and open to other people's oppinion. When I'm working with her I have to try and cosider her thoughts and aspects of the task.

Our assignment was to design a poster for a food industry that delivers to office and work spaces. Our first thing to do was to find test photo's to help inspire us to create a picture to accompany our poster. We got started on research for our advertisement campaign using laptops to look at certain websites for 'inspiring' pictures to create for our advertisement. We used the search engine 'Google' which provided us with images but not what we where looking for. This caused a problem as we only had a lesson to find test photos so we decided to use another source, called 'iStockphoto' which produced photographs other people had taken for other people to observe. For example the photo's in the links below:

• http://www.istockphoto.com/stock-photo-3352577-chocolate-chip-muffin-and-cup-of-coffee.php
• http://www.istockphoto.com/stock-photo-1156232-coffee-cake-muffin.php

These links are to test photo's that I thought where very helpful to us. They are intersting and express what we where looking for which was photo's that explained our project using as little props as possible. We had found the new source of photo's for Mr.Hind. We decided to create a similar photograph to the one below (left). I suggested that we use props such as muffins and magazines to make the photograph more friendly and inviting. We then went onto create our picture of a tea cup, mag and a muffin with a laptop peeking into the photo however there was a few things missing - the muffin and magazine. This was troublesome as we only had a few lessons in which to complete our campaign task. I suggested that we go to the shop just from the school to get our last few props. Fortunately with permission from Mr.Hind we did that. This helped us move forward in our project as the next step was to shoot our photo. We didn't have time to apply the photo from the camera on to the computer but we did manage to make most of our advertisement leaflet. This was disappointing because I wanted to complete the leaflet in time; the tassignmetn was fairly straight forward however the timeing was an issue.

Today has been a little stressful because of the lack of props and where to shoot our photo despite that I think we overcame the problems by working together as a team. I think to work better we need to include outside opinions as well as our own to make the project even better.

Personally , I have been pleased with how I worked in a team with the people I was with. I have started and led discussions on where to take photographs, I think this will help me in my leadership skills. I think I have used my inititave when it came down to not having enough props. I think I need to be more open to my group members about my feeling on the project rather than to keep quiet.