Areas i need to improve:

from my feedback it seems i need to go into more detail about the changes in music so student can write about things like convergence in the exams - thats one of the things i havnt yet covered (among others). So far i think i need to just doubley make sure that my essay meets all of the important revision points for the students otherwise it'll be pretty invalid to the newspaper and not contain any info that was necessary to utilize. I'll try and cover more aspects other than music too to try and bring out good terminology/jargon for students to learn..

additional research

hyperbass - research:
http://annemareebarry.blogspot.com/2009/10/l-vis-1990.html
"I don't blog as much as I'd like to these days, however, when I find something that is really worth sharing I stop editing and go for it. Nic James - one of Dublin's finest DJs and resident of Toe Jam at the Bernard Shaw, told me about L-VIS 1990 a few weeks ago, mumblings about being an old man at a gig with youngsters/hipsters but gushing about a great young DJ that makes his own crazy music videos. Nic James was correct with his trend predicting as L VIS 1990 has the most exciting 'sound' I have heard in a long time."

http://electriqueboutique.blogspot.com/2007/10/l-vis-1990-lives.html
"When not working on music videos for Armand Van Helden and most recently the Stereo MC's, young up-start and Brighton based agent provocateur L-Vis 1990 aka James Connolly can be found making bass fuelled dance music made for flying into war. Electrique Boutique takes 5 to talk crap with the man with bleeding ears:"

http://dippedindollars.com/2010/01/06/l-vis/
"I have been blown away by the work of L-Vis 1990 (James Connolly). One of my aunts married a Dutch dude who allowed me to travel to Hilversum/Amsterdam a few years ago, where I was introduced to the spirit of Hyper Bass."

popular imagery today - research:
Rorsach test (possibly inspired by Watchmen but also vid art like this:

The Lion King/Tropical/African imagery:

 

as shown in the videos below:

Fonts

when coming up with the newspaper post below, I discovered that using a narrow font like Arial Narrow can really pack extra text in, while keeping it totally legible too... and at 12pt! which is our minimum size (most papers are around 9pt). so now we may have an option that could really halp us cram our articles in without having to shorten them too much..

NEWSPAPER FRONT PAGE idea

layout aspects

we need:

pull-out quotes
headers
footers
main title
sub title
page number
issue number
logo
crossheads
intro text
captions
images
infographics
text wrapped images
box-out

you can see my newspaper style sheet in the post beneath:

style sheet

Minutes of our newspaper meeting

we just discussed all the class' template/style sheets in a small group. each aspect that we didnt agree with we aired, these were:

-The poor use of text wrapping
- the boring text
- unproffesional imagery
- lack of header and footers
- better placement of by-lines and box-outs, in order to present a better, less confusing read - we might border them
- nicer wrapping and smaller text for the quotation pull-outs

this discussion went very quickly as we picked out the negatives really quickly - this may have been as we only had one lesson to work on the previews and rushed ourselves to get the text on there as soon as possible for examples.

we;re now about to work on our new style-sheet in Pages. we've decided to drop the possibility of using InDesign as none of us know exactly how to use it well. after all, Pages is perfectly adequate - it centre images well, has good fonts, masking capabilities and wrapping options - all important for our tabloid design.

Todays Lesson

today we came up with templates for our newspapers and exported them in a3 pdf files to be printed off - we used real articles written by us and tried to fit them into a DPS (double page spread) - it was very tough, i think we may need to shorten them down considerably. I felt my fonts were presented nicely - i thought hard about making sure it all synergised through seriff and sans seriff as well as column width and text box placement.

Ideally i would've used Adobe InDesign to create the layout as it's far more versatile than Pages - pages has nice "snapping" properties to centre images but other than that it feels like a cheap reipoff of MS word. I dont have that much experience with InDesign but i'll try n learn this weekend...

Imagery to be featured

Action Plan

Previous week's:
- To come up with more draft work
- Make the draft far less 1st person at address it as a view of "the people".
- Find imagery to include within the article + create my own - hopefully the images i cant get hold of are royalty free.
- Find websites or software allowing for info-graphics similar to facebook/youtube insights.
- Collect and collate various sources to get a good, overall opinion

Overall, all of these have been met - finding imagery is tough but I think I'd like to create a lot on photoshop as a personal analysis of what's "in". An example of my work is here: http://rghtsblg.blogspot.com/ - i coded and photoshopped this page entirely..

This weeks:
- actually create the imagery
- finish off the draft completely and shorten by about 20/30% to make it more catchy to read while still keeping information going strong.
- Design style-sheets for the project to make sure we have variations of layout designs - i have already posted an early one prior to this post

Draft (finished)

Zeit·geist


–noun German.


The spirit of the time; general trend of thought or feeling characteristic of a particular period of time.

You may have heard of this term before, mentioned around fashion. The way it applies heavily to this area is as fashion, a term to describe a trend in aesthetic or lifestyle choices, only manages to change it’s trends via the zeitgeist - a force created by a hive-mind styled form of communication from many forms of media, often web 2.0 (like blogs and image-hosting sites were the content is classed as ‘we-media’).

The current zeitgeist, or, ‘spirit of the times’ we’re going through right now, is a transition from revamped visual revivals from the 1980’s, to the 1990’s. We can see this, as our recent craze for all things 80’s between 2004 and 2009 has begun to fade - instead of all underground imagery such as album art work, video and graphic design using imagery inspired by the likes of Miami Vice, Tron and Ferris Beuller’s Day Off, they’ve started moving on to more 1990’s based aesthetics, focusing more on popular visuals from the time such as Terminator 2, Jurassic Park and Back to the Future 3.

A good example would be the ‘off-the-radar’ craze of remixing films for music videos, as first seen in Ratatat’s video for their song ‘Mirando’, ‘mashing’ up footage from Predator to a tribal beat. Video mashing is an often illegal form of video art created by hijacking copyright video of youtube and editing it to ones likes. After this video, a new scene was introduced, different to the commercial craze of geometric visuals and neon lit text e.g. Daft Punk’s stage imagery and M.I.A.’s music videos, that instead takes on far more organic forms, such as African patterns and tropical wildlife - this seems like an ironic take on childhood Disney films such The Lion King and Tarzan. It could however be more accurately a depiction on hip hop imagery from the time such as Afrika Bambaata’s or A Tribe Called Quest’s. This transformation in our present zeitgeist is a very strange thing to try and bring across in a literary from, but one the best examples around is Douster’s music video for his track ‘Triassic’ the epitome of this afro/dinosaur imagery. Or the increasing popularity of Rainbow Arabia, an afro-beat/dub collective that are really reviving the spirit found in a lot of Leftfield songs (circa ’95) via a lot of African inspired vocals or instruments. They re-utilize beats and breaks that have since become unpopular in the mainstream too, usually found in old acid-house and rave tracks, for example, the often sampled James Brown breaks.

The transition in music is definitely showing, most clearly in fact.
About 3 years ago, within underground electronic music, the favored tempo was around 120 beats per minute, giving the sound a very typically 1980’s ‘whoompf’ to the drumming that really works well on the dance-floor, this is especially visible with the clubbers drug of choice at the time which was speed and ecstasy. In the past 2 years, the tempo has been put up to a choppier and punchier speed reminiscent more of Prodigy’s early material at around 140 BPM, almost reviving the first decade of amphetamines with the now (il)legal mephedrone which is stirring even more controversy due to it’s unknown side-effects. It seems like an entirely modern take on acid-house culture.
This change in speed has been mainly introduced by the likes of L-VIS 1990 aka James Connolly and Sinden aka Graeme Sinden, pioneers of the new, ‘hyperbass’ genre, inspired heavily by early breakbeat, D’n’B and ironically, bad American dance music. The sound is thick, repetitive and throws the once so popular Korg synth out the window. Other artists catching on to the phenomena are Herve, Switch and BokBok.

When I try to picture the blend of 80’s and 90’s sound, hyperbass’ audio features are a clean balance:

Drum loops (1990’s) - Often samples, the reuse of hip hop or rave drum loops is definitely back, mainly for nostalgia but also for the irony (which will soon become the norm).

Instruments (1980’s) – Stil l, the use of echoing and droning synths are used in a dark manner, reminding me a lot of Laurie Anderson or Inner City.

Vocals (80’s/90’s crossover) – R’n’B vocals found in both decades are revisited, probably for their great hip hop-to-rave relations (commonly know as ‘hip-house’ at the time). The hip house vocal style can be found in many of Simian Mobile Disco’s ‘Temporary Pleasure’ album, released mid 2009.

Here’s the tricky part though. How on earth would one predict what the next spirit of the times will be? How would somebody manage to ‘forecast’ whats coming up? If we carry on in a relative way, what you read below could well be an accurate enough depiction…

The ‘Formula’ of a zeitgeist:
Right now, our formula seems to have us taking visual and/or lifestyle aspects from approximately 15 years ago. Meaning, around 2004, we were bringing back aspects found in ‘84 to ‘89 – as we’ve progressed 6 years (until the present day) so had the retro styles we were going crazy for. But, along the line we’ve moved into the next decade – meaning exactly 15 years ago, we were in ’95, the years of Kindergarten Cop, acid-wash jeans and The Spice Girl’s gaudiness.
Remember this though, the pattern allows for movement between the 15 year window, so you don’t have to precisely move on in time, instead, you can take on a post-modern approach and blend aesthetic values together in whichever way you feel is affective.

When you understand this so-called formula of the zeitgeist, you’ll have the ability to predict what could possibly come next. Here are a list of predictions:

A retro revisiting of the millennium hysteria that built up in everyone. What I mean is that at the turn of the century, people were getting ready for ‘the future’ – nylon and other technological textiles became massive, music from rave to rock was diversifying and fusing with other genres, as well as TV and film themes really beginning to push the boundaries of regular viewing. This was all in effort of feeling new, and in about 3 more years I think we’ll all be trying to replicate that imagery…

The return of scallyism, this time however, for the middle-class. It sounds horrendous but I truly think this will happen as with the 90’s came casual sportswear, surely somebody will bring that back to life? In fact, sport imagery already is beginning to show it’s face – New Power Studio is probably the first sportswear company to disregard the ‘form follows function’ rule with exercise wear and flip it round completely.

Grunge will most definitely show it’s greasy fringe again. I really do think the droop-group aesthetic will capture all of us once more, then leading us on to it’s more evolved and refined goth form. This look will definitely have a huge impact on film, mainly in the areas of cinematography – bleak, bland, monochromatic and grainy footage will prevail. People will definitely begin ironically using DV handi-cams again for that extra scrappy look – last time grunge and goth culture wasn’t for the mainstream. Now it’s been and gone. More people will accept it into the mainstream again, knowing it better than before and being able to fall back on previous imagery – you wouldn’t be able to do that when a new movement starts as it’s a fresh thing without much inspirational imagery for you to utilize. So this way, commercial directors will be more comfortable with grunge aesthetics.

Here are other brief possibilities:

Ironic Anime, Pokemon ripoffs – not just for kids I’d like to add.

The reintroduction of pirate-look filming e.g. Chris Cunningham trademark 90’s look,
where the film is played off a TV screen and refilmed.

PS2 games will eventually become retro - It wont be surprising when FIFA’99 takes Sonic or Street Fighter’s place in popular imagery (going with the upcoming scallie/hooligan look).

Remember the Y2K bug? Well with the predictions for 2012, expect to see some more Armageddon raves and colossal amounts of fresh iconography.

Differences between the scally and the chav (relates to the sportswear/scally revival) RESEARCH

(wikipedia)

The scally has a much more diverse and detailed history. In terms of stereotypical dress, scallies today often wear designer tracksuits and trainers (Nike Air Max and Reebok Classics in particular). They also wear dark coloured clothing usually black, navy blue and grey. This clothing, bizarrely consists of a lot of "outward bound" brand names such as "The North Face" and, especially for hats "Lowe Alpine". The reason for this is unclear but it is speculated that this attire is expensive, aspirational and functional and thus practical for their needs. Functional to the scallys lifestyle and leisure activities which may consist of loitering in public, anti-social, violent and criminal behaviour and general "loutishness". Although not exclusive to females this image is primarily male. This is in contrast to the chav's stereotypical counterfeit Burberry outfits and excessive “bling” jewellery.

to be finshed... article

The Zeitgeist Forecast.

references:
www.rghtsblg.blogspot.com
“All famous (or underground) media practitioners have exhibited their work on way or another. Right now, most commonly it is via the internet – the infinite scale of it allows people to literally find anything they want. In other words, if you search it, chances are you’ll find it, or at least something related to it. Websites like Youtube, FlickR, Vimeo and Facebook as well as the more niche marketing sites like 4chan and Facepunch (targeted more at the internet-savvy geekier ones of us) are most definitely the leaders of the pack when it comes to spreading the word.”

www.thepop.com/
“POP 240 Tuesday, 9 March 2010
“Today's POP is Tom. He's got a bitching biker-jacket. We think it makes him look tough.
Giambattista Valli gave us a proper flash-back to our first encounter with Star Wars as he presented MONCLER GAMMA ROUGE in Paris. Remember those über-chic robots and weird sexy uniforms? As a young boy at the time, this was the apex of anything sultry and cool. No wonder we were charmed.“

These sites, all share information and styles that I plan to utilize in my article - they are: informal language, many references to other practitioners and an overall audience/writer connection.

Article:

Zeit·geist
–noun German.
the spirit of the time; general trend of thought or feeling characteristic of a particular period of time.

You may have heard of this term before, mentioned around fashion. The way it applies heavily to this area best is the fact that fashion, as a term to describe a trend in aesthetic or lifestyle choices, only manages to change it’s trends via the changes in a zeitgeist - a force created by a hive-mind-esque form of communication between peers, often through web 2.0 like blogs and image-hosting sites.
The current zeitgeist, or, “spirit of the times” we’re going through right now, I’d say is a transition from revamped visual revivals from the 1980’s, to the 1990’s. We can see this, as our recent craze for all things 80’s between 2004 and 2009 is slowly coming to a halt - instead of all underground imagery such as album art work, video and graphic design using imagery inspired by the likes of Robocop, Tron and Ferris Beuller’s Day Off, they’ve started moving on to more 1990’s based aesthetics, focusing more on popular visuals from the time such as Terminator 2, Jurassic Park and Back to the Future (3).
An example would be the current and highly “off-the-radar craze” of remixing films for music videos, as first seen in Ratatat’s song “Mirando”, mashing up footage from Predator to a tribal beat. After seeing this video I was instantly introduced into a new scene, different to the commercial craze of geometric visuals and neon lit text e.g. Daft Punk’s stage imagery and M.I.A.’s music videos, that instead takes on more organic forms, such as african patterns and tropical wildlife - I think this could be an ironic revival of 1990’s, highly British children's TV that focused often on tropical wildlife and African savvanah creatures (like The Really Wild Show or Blue Peter). It is a very strange thing to try and describe, but one the best examples I can give is Douster’s music video for his track “Triassic” OR the increasing popularity of Rainbow Arabia, an afro-beat/techno/electro collective that are really reviving the spirit found in a lot of Leftfield songs via a lot of African inspired vocals or instruments. They re-utilize beats and breaks that have since become unpopular in the mainstream too, usually found in old acid-house and rave tracks, for example, the often sampled James Brown breaks.

Film Conventions:
(2004 - 2009: 1980's revival)
-Films such as Son of Rambow, revisiting a hyper-real period in the 1980's, ringing across more than life nostalgia and imagery - could be considered a stereotypically 19080's practice in it __________(more to come)_________


extra points to be made:
- a formula of a zeitgeist (why at the moment, do we only revive things approximately 15 years ago? meaning our current "look" is a revival of the TRANSITION between the 80's to 90's)

- How have conventions from both eras in film, music, art, photography, etc been blended together to created a look that is neither one or the other?

- What can we expect in the future - 00's revival of nylon combats and other tech textiles? will we end up looking like characters from the fifth element (ironically)? - (ONLY AN EXAMPLE)

- What conventions can we expect in the future in film, music, art, photography, etc? will we slowly invent a new style? what could it be?

- Timelines and charts to be created for visual explanations when literary would be hard. nicely designed Infographics

Project Plan

Week 1:
(retrospectively)
During our first week, we were dispersed into a red, ble and gold team, each working together to create their own portion of the newspaper - our team came to the decision that we'd make articles on: Zeitgeists, technical convergance and web 2.0. My article was the zietgeist one - I wanted to see if it was possible to somehow predict one, like a forecast, that way on some level a formula could be revealed, and if the events predicted are accurate enough, there could be some chance of them happening earlier than planned due to people picking up the conventions in a future-proof manner.

Week 2:
I've started writing my article as well as coming up with infographics that can also be inserted into it. Alongside my own articles graphic design I have been assigned the role of art-director, meaning I'll be in charge of the newspaper imagery that could proove highly successful at reaching out targeted demographic - hopefully I'll hit the nail on the head with this and really make a visual impact, as well as a literary one.

Week 3:
Throughout week three, I'll be showing the production managers my article alonside it's graphics, seeing what they like (and dont) in order to revamp it or trim it down however they need - I aim  to make it as accessable to everybody as possible so it wont need any mass alterations (i'd find it heartbreaking to scrap a section about the technology-curve i'm working on).

Week 4:
Is unplanned so far, at the moment we're planning our next week after the present, meaning nothing to different to what we've been working with'll be sprung on us. I'll update this later on, possibly in the weekend as all of our out-of-college email correspondance will be done too.

Zeitgeist Forecast - key word: paradigm

Here is an article reffereing to the topic I'd like to talk about in the magazine. It is about zeitgeists and forecasting them, estimating what aspects will be possibly happening in the future - knowin this information can be extremely helpful for commercial corporations as they can start planning ahead with Interlectual Property, art direction and production, therefor giving them a strong grip on there audience constantly with stuff that'll always interest them.

http://www.creativeclass.com/creative_class/2008/01/09/zeitgeist-forecast/

The Points raised are very intrigueing, but I feel I could definitely write a far more "spot-on" prediction regaring the change and convergence of conventions in all forms of popular media. It'd be quite easy as I'd look at a lot of popular culture websites such as Vice.com as well as magazines and "read between the lines" - what I mean is to read multiple articles from those sources but seek out reoccuring themes and catagorize them - once they're catagorized, I can then work out which "ideas" have been around the longest, meaning the newest will be the ones that'll be emerging most in the next yer or so E.G. if I came across multiple articles regarding "hyper-bass" (a new genre of music uprising from London with heavy influences from electro, dubstep, acid and drum n bass as well as tribal house) I would catagorize Hyper-bass, then search it, looking fr the earliest articles online, if they are only new, then that ould be an early sign of the next "feeling of the times". If however a reoccuring theme is, say, stencil artwork, it'd be clearly on it's way out - there was a boom recently but I feel this may be slowing down - hopefully I'd come across a NEW street-art form to talk about instead.
It's tricky to fully explain how it'd be done but i'm pretty set on making it work. I'd like to use timelines and graphs a lot as they give a good sense of knowledge to the audience as well as adding proffesionalism to the publication. Hey, giving this forecast could bring the events on even quicker than initially planned for - that'd be pretty cool.

Here is another site that could be of use:
http://www.thezeitgeistmovement.com/joomla/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=19&Itemid=54

Paper Planning

1. Sketch initial ideas - basic:

2. Extend detail and improve ideas:

3. Start to add titles and main points to the page designs. A lot of writing should have been done now, and what features go where should be finalised:

4. Finalise and print ideas.

My Final Question

My final question for Pete to ask students outside of Longroad is:

Do you appreciate film, photography, art, fashion or music but want to know more? Either about conventions or how it "works"?

Layout Inspiration - SuperSuper Magazine

The layout is completely DIY - anyone could do it, thats what makes it appealing. The colours are very intense and the text often bold and spread across two pages. I posted a link to their site earlier on.

Content Possibilities

Click for full image.

Visual Designs

Beneath will be a list of imagery inspirations:

Blog Reference

This is a blog me and about 10 friends work on. It's documents film, art, music, fashion and photography - we've publicized via Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, DIGG and many other traffic building sites. I would like our group to take a look for visual references as well as subject matter (even though I'm still working on building up it's speed of journalism":

WWW.RGHTSBLG.BLOSPOT.COM

What I'd Like t o do...

In this project I'll only be happy working in art-direction. It's my best area in a production like this (I've decided). Otherwise, I'd like to write about art(forms) such as video-art, net-art, favourite painters (mainstream / underground / influential) and many other areas of creativity.

An example that I'll bring in tomorrow is SuperSuper Magazine.


SuperSuper is basically a great culture magazine with the most inside chatter about whats is new in music, film, fashion and art conventions - it may be very vaguely and madly pretentious BUT having an alternative and stereotypically "arty" or "pretentious" view on things is always the best way to go.
Analyzing magazines or blogs like this by reading between the lines and seeing what zeitgeist it's catching onto is what will give us the best scope for ultra-up-to-date material which'll be the prime subject matter for students needing to talk about convergence.

The Client

Our client is Jenny Graham at the English and media centre who will distribute the paper via their website (if it meets their requirements). We well also seek advice and information from Julian McDougall, principal examiner for A2 OCR media studies.

We will work in 4 teams; 3 teams producing content (4 pages each) and one quality control team overseeing the others. We will each have a specific role and keep a journal of your individual progress as well as our maintaining a group blog to keep the rest of the teams and our client up to date.

The ideas and strategies we devise must be suited to the learning styles of 16-19 year olds and we will test, tweak and revise our materials by trying them out on students in other classes and colleges before our newspaper "goes to print"

The Brief

We will produce a 12-page, full colour, tabloid-size "newspaper" consisting of study materials to help OCR media studies students answer the A2 critical perspectives exam.

In small groups we will need to research, plan and produce our own case studies, learning plans and lesson activities for use by students and teachers in post-16 education (schools, sixth form and FE colleges). We must also find advertisers to help cover your costs of production. (My dad is an advertiser)

We should make the paper visually interesting, intellectually engaging, exam specific and up-to-date: we gotta think of games; investigations and simulations; comic strips; timelines; info-graphics; interviews and analysis of our own primary research with real audiences and media users/producers.