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We started off with Alec giving a small presentation in which he spoke about himself and examples of work that he had done.
Then we started the workshop.
We were put into groups of four or five and in the first 25mins we had to think of ideas for what our own independent magazine would be based on and include and how the concept would filter through everything.
Alec had bought a number of magazines with him for us to use as inspiration to help us get a feel of what we might want to create. He also handed out a sheet, on which had a list of different magazines to refer to and also the independent magazines which had used Kickstarter to fund their magazine. On the other side it had the areas we needed to answer and cover with our own proposed magazine. These were
- Concept
- Audience
- Aesthetic
- Strategy
- Lifespan
- Progression
I was in the group with Ewan, Lizzy and Priyesh. One of the first thoughts was film, as Ewan is a avid film wacther and we all enjoy watching them, we felt this was a topic we all had something in common with.
After long discussion and feedback from every member of the group we eventually decided and agreed on the idea.
Concept_
- Independent film magazine focusing on a director each issue, released bi-annually
Audience_
- Avid film watchers, Students of the Arts, 18 years plus
Aesthetic_
- Tactile, collectable, high end, mature
Strategy_
- Each issue would focus on one director, including the films that they have directed and a bio on them. With a 'One to Watch' section at the end. This way our content would be different every issue but consistent within the theme. As the magazine would be a collectable, even if one didn't hugely like a specific director they would still want to buy the magazine as it would go with all the others.
Lifespan_
- Until we run out of directors. Keep it alive as long as possible.
Progression_
- Obviously we would want our readers and buyers to keep expanding, and potentially ship abroad to other cities such as New York or Europe. We would also like to include interviews with the directors themselves if we got big enough.
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We then had to come up with a name for our magazine. We wanted something that represented the stem of an idea and like the core of the director.
- Nucleus
- Core
- Seed
These were the main names we came up with and we all agreed and were happy with SEED. So this became the name of our independent film magazine.
The next step was to create an image of what our proposed cover would look like. The magazines Alec bought in were very helpful for this as it allowed us to get an idea of what we wanted and what we didn't want.
Priyesh had his laptop and started mocking up ideas. We all agreed that we wanted an strong image of the relevant director as the cover along with the his/her name and the name of the magazine.
Here were some mock ups Priyesh made, we all gave feedback and comments to work it down to final cover we were all happy with.
Alec came round to speak to us and to see how we were getting along, he saw that we had named our magazine SEED, and said that when he reads the word seed, he won't think of films, he would think of gardening and when your magazine is getting stocked in a store, it needs to be clear what section is should be shown in as if it got put in the wrong section such as the gardening section, you would inevitably loose sales.
However we all really liked the name seed and the fact it wasn't an obvious name, however we agreed that we needed something to make it more clear that it was a film magazine, so we decided to add a bi line.
While Priyesh carried on making mock ups, Ewan, Lizzy and I tried to think of a good bi line, We thought of using the phrase, 'The Directors Cut' however the meaning for this didn't make sense in terms of a bi line for the magazine. Ewan then thought of 'A look behind the author of the film' as that is a term that is used to describe directors. We still weren't quite sure however.
We thought again about 'The Directors Cut' and thought that maybe it didn't need to be seen in the literal meaning, but actually we could create a play on words with the phrase, as our magazine was all about a director and thus fitted with this very well.
These were the final covers we decided on. They included, the image and name of the specific director, the title and bi line for the magazine, barcode, issue and price and a list of the main films created by that director.
How would it get funding?
We needed to think about what we would create to aim to get funding for the magazine. Alec told us to look at the kickstarter website and gave us a list of examples that had good videos and ways of getting people to fund their project.
I went onto the website to watch some of the videos and see what ideas others had come up with, one video I watched was the DAYJOB magazine one which I really liked and it did make me want to see the magazine become a real thing.
So taking inspiration from this I thought we could propose a similar video in which would show snippets of the directors directing and snippets from the films we would be writing about, with music in the background and type across the page explaining the magazine.
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