Annotated Bibliography

Annotated Bibliography 

Creative Critical Reflection

 Dear Blogger,

This is my creative critical reflection for this project. I hope you enjoy my thoughts about this project.

How does your product use or challenge conventions and how does it represent social groups or issues? (shown through a poster)

                                                 

How does your product engage with audiences and how would it be distributed as a real media text? (shown through a Prezi presentation)

Question 2

How did your production skills develop throughout this project?

(shown through a podcast with a picture of my fish Orion. He passed away last week as of writing this... may he rest in peace)

Question 3

How did you integrate technologies – software, hardware and online – in this project? (shown through a video presentation with a voice over)

Question 4

Final Draft: Claw Stars

Whelp, it has been a long road and there were so many hardships that I had to overcome. But here we are. I'm so proud of what I created and I'm very glad to share it with you. So without further ado, here is my finished magazine project.

Post Production

Dear Blogger,

So, it has been a while since I last posted. Sorry about that. I was very busy. I have been making plenty of edits to the main project based off of the peer review. I will say that the peer review was very helpful, especially for the content page of this project. So let's see what I changed to the project throughout this month. 

For the magazine, I started by looking at the critiques that I was given by my peers and looked at the one's I could do. The first was getting rid of the extra pictures on the cover page. This was to help emulate the sophisticated and polished style, since our biggest praise was our polished pictures. We also agreed with the paw print idea and put a paw print in the bottom right corner with the date of the issue. It now looks like this:

For the content page, we went with the concept of the paw print pictures. The idea was that the paw print pictures would be faded in the background while the text of the contents were in front them. This caused it to look like this:

It's not perfect, but it is such an improvement on the first draft. I still need to fix the pictures on the pawprints, but I really like this.

As for the featured article, I didn't really change much. All I did was turn the photos into paw prints on the second page and fixed the text a bit. So now it looks like this:

These changes definitely helped make the magazine look for professional. There was also much more conversations about the concept between me and Bailey. This helped make our magazines look more cohesive. Communication was somewhat of a problem during our first pass. Now, our magazines look like they could be from the same line up. 

I am still editing everything and making it look as best as I could. However, there are still other things I need to work on for this portfolio project. However, that will be explained in the next blog post. See ya in the next blog. 

Peer Review

 Dear blogger,

...well, I feel like a total idiot. I actually thought that the last two blogs were going to be the last blogs for this project. I still stand by everything I said though in the final thoughts blog, except for the fact that it was my final project.

So after I created, what I now know is, the rough draft, we showed it in front of our peers and took notes. Here is what my notes looked liked by the end of it.

Can't read it? Well, here is the, somewhat accurate, text translation to the mess of scribbles on the page:

Title Page:

• My main cover picture is very good and glossy. So ditch the other smaller pictures and just keep to the big one.
• Add the smaller titles to the sides.
• Make the "Claw Stars" bigger and put it in all caps.
• Add the time issue somewhere (like August 2020).
• Add selling line (after we make one).
• Fix to a specific color scheme.
• Perhaps have a "Paw Star of the Month" with Maddie (more on that later).
• Change the font to be more sophisticated.

Content Page:

• Redo everything.... next
• Turn the circle pictures into paws because it's animal related.
• Add the Claw Star of the month here.
• Put a faded picture of one of the pets with their owners in the background and then put the text on top. It will fix it that way.
• Change the font and size of text.

Feature Article:

• Make the title bigger.
• Take more pictures of the owners with their pets.
• Get rid of the line in the middle of the second page and fix the article layout.
• Change the circles to paw prints.

Concept:

• Work with Bailey to solidify the concept look.
• Yeah...that's about it.    

So overall... I have a lot of work to get through. This is going to be a bit rough, but I think I can get through it. I'm probably going to start with redesigning the content page with Bailey so that we can start getting our concept together. 

Then I'll see if I can get more pictures. Since I already have the interviews, I won't need to stay at their houses for long and it can make my parents breath easier with their qualms of covid. Another thing is that I finally got my license!!! So now I don't need to rely on my parents to take me from place to place. I still need to tell them where I'm going and for how long, but it makes it so much easier on me to get to where I need.

I'm not sure what the next blog will be about, but I guess we'll see when we get there. See ya next blog!

1st Draft: Claw Stars

 

My Final Thoughts

Dear Blogger,

As I stated in the last blog, this one is going to be a very long one. I know you are really eager to see the final product, but you will need to wait a bit... unless you decided to scroll to the bottom. To those who didn't immediately scroll to the bottom because you are actually an amazing person, here is my thoughts about the project as a whole.

You've probably already read my other blog posts and the thoughts I had with each specific step. I didn't know what the final product would look like, so most of the time I was just commenting on how I felt at the time. Let's start from the beginning: Decision Day.

Technically the "Decision Day" blog isn't the first blog post I did, but it was probably the most important blog I created. It was the turning point of the entire project. Just to recall your memory, decision day was when I decided whether to create a short two minute opening of a film or four pages of a magazine. At the time, I thought that the magazine would have been more doable than the film. I can now confirm that the film would have not only been harder, but also borderline impossible for me to accomplish. I know that I could come up with a killer plot for a film. Heck, I could even storyboard in the same day. But the problem was getting the videos. I had no time during winter break to film.

I traveled to Las Vegas and Arizona with my family for the majority of the break. When I did come back, not only was I tired, but it was also New Year's Eve. I don't know about you guys, but my family takes the whole day to celebrate the new year (even though we couldn't invite anyone). So what would that leave me with two to three weeks to do all of the shooting, editing, and polishing. Yeah... no. That would not have worked out. I'm very happy that I saved my self all the trouble and chose the magazine project. 

I'm going to go over this next session pretty quickly because I already covered most of it before. When I was deciding whether to pair or not, I really had to consider the pros and cons to each side. I know that I don't work well with most people; but I also, knew for a project like this, I needed someone who could help me if I get stuck. Paring up was a very good decision. It actually worked out for both Bailey and I. Every time someone needed help, 99% of the time the other could help out. If I didn't have Bailey, I probably would have had to rush this more than it already is. So thank you so much Bailey for being my partner for this project. 

So when I was choosing a topic for the magazine, I needed to make sure that it was something both me and my partner, Bailey, could do. By that, I mean it has to be something we could both write about and get pictures for. That is why we quickly jumped to doing a magazine about pets. It was a good idea since both Bailey and I have pets and we know people who own pets. It would be easy to get pictures and interviews. And it was.... for Bailey. For me, I had to rush it a bit with the pictures and interviews. Thank God for the internet to get the interviews. Even though my parents surprised us with the trip, I probably should have seen it coming (even though we are in the middle of a pandemic). But, I was still able to get it done. 

I think I should have chosen something easier, like home living, but I'm honestly happy we chose animals. It let me go out a bit in a time where we can't really go out much. So that was nice. I had a blast getting the pictures and interviews. I know you guys couldn't really listen to the audio from one of my interviews, but if you did, you would know that if was fun... mainly because Maddie kept climbing on my mother and I during the conversation. Fun times!

When writing the article, I wanted to make it like a scientific review with a few personal stories sprinkled throughout. If you have read my previous blog post, then you will know that I said that water dripping from a pipe is much more interesting that whatever the heck I wrote. The reason I went for a scientific approach first was because I only know how to write two things: journal article reviews and argumentative essays. I can also write very detailed non-fiction fantasy stories, but that doesn't apply here. 

Anyway, after realizing my mistakes, and getting the interviews, I started to change the writing in my article from a journal article review, to a semi argumentative essay. For starters, I ditched pretty much all the scientific research but one. I figured that one was enough to get my point across. Then I used most of the interviews and had that as the center of my article. After all, the magazine was supposed to show how pets helped their fellow humans. What better way to show that than having their owners go on and on about how they positively changed their lives. If I ever need to write another article, I think I will take it on as an argumentative essay to prove something. It won't be anything that will change the views of the audience drastically, but definitely something to get my point across.... you know, maybe I should have chosen a hot topic that people are constantly debating on.... oh well...

On to the editing. So I probably waited longer than I should have to start the editing. It did seem like a very VERY big obstacle so I knew I put it off when I shouldn't have. Eventually when I did muster up  

the courage to start editing, I found that it wasn't as hard as I originally thought it would be. Sure, I did feel better with Premier Pro when contrasting it to Indesign; however, after doing some research, I got the hang of it. I do think that overall Premier Pro was easier for me, but it wasn't too hard to adjust to Indesign. I should have just been open minded about the app; it would have saved me a lot of time. Never the less, I still finished it and I think it looks great! I've been rambling for a while so without further ado, here is the almost finished product!

Now when I say "almost finished" it just means that I'm happy with the product I created and I'm still making a few more tweaks for tomorrow. So when you see the four magazine pages tomorrow, there will be a few changes to make it look better. I'm not sure what I'm going to change at this point. I guess that we'll just wait until tomorrow's blog post.

I have to say, I never thought that I'd be kind of sad to stop these blog posts. I know that after tomorrow's blog post, I won't be posting anything else because the project is done. There's nothing left to do. It feels... weird to say the least. I enjoyed doing this project, even though some of it was a bit rushed and made me feel a bit panicked. These blog posts have become kind of a weird project journal/diary to me. I know that's the point, but I've never thought of it like that until recently. Huh... I guess that's just how things are. Funny. Anyway, if you've made it to this point of my rambling, I just want to say thank you for coming on this trip with me. Even if the final product isn't the best out of the bunch or if I get a bad grade on it, I can say that I'm really proud of it and I'm glad that I was able to share it with you. Thank you so much from the bottom of my heart. Until next time, farewell dear viewer.