Interview written up!

The interview I wrote up included 8 questions (some long some short.)

Its 2013! Tell us Jaya, what are you looking forward to this year?

Inoe woohoo! Urm, well what can I say to be honest, I’m hoping to focus really hard on my music and get where I really want to be, go on a holiday with my family as I’ve hardly had time to spend time with them ever since getting into this whole music thing..

How did you music is what you wanted to do full time? Did you get inspired?

Well since I was 5, I loved singing a lot and as I grew older, I was really and to be honest, ONLY, into hip hop/rnb music. Like my role model at the time was Cassie! I loved her and still do. (ofcourse)

So tell us how did you develop your sound?

Um basically it all started when I was 16 years old when I performed in my school talent show in 2009. Someone had recorded me performing solo and it went all over twitter, facebook and youtube and I started getting a lot of likes and thumps up for my talent. This made me think to take my singing further as my career which I did so with the love and support of my family and friends. My older cousin had links to local record labels and when he told them about me they seemed really impressed as he showed a demo of my singing/rap. Before I knew it,  I had few offers to make songs locally and within a boom! I started getting more offers from other well known record labels. I could not believe it! This is how I am here right now and wish to go next level with my sound..

You must have plans for working on new projects? Or are you currently working on something right now?

Well I am currently working on something right now, but I will not leak anything out just yet, let’s keep it a surprise shall we haha

Describe yourself in 3 words..

Mad, fierce, ghetto!
 

Who would you love to collab with in the future?

I would LOVE to collab with a couple of people who are Cassie and Drake! Their my top favourite female and male hip hop artists! One day lets see..who knows..
 

Sounds sick! But what we want to know is what do you do when your not making music?

Haha oh no.. hmm I often spend a lot of time with family and friends when I am not focusing on my job because with their love and support, I am what I am today! Also love to go out late nights for a drink with friends on the weekends, dinner, parties at each others, chill sessions really! But when I have alone time, I often like to read which you guys are probably getting shocked when you hear this! But its good to snug up for a change in bed with a book i guess
 

We want to know where you see yourself in 5 years time?

Now now now, I’m not good with thinking too ahead but im hoping to be very successful with my career, drama free life and maybe find my Mr right..

Edited front cover image

As the mast head and clothing are red, my main colour running through the front cover is red. The image I took to be my potential front cover image fits in well of what I expected apart from one thing which was the camera did not pick up the vibrant red lipstick that would of stood out if the camera did catch it. Then I went on the editing website (befunky.com) to apply fake red lipstick and apply it on her lips. This is how I did and looked like in the end..

Playing around with Indesign

From the lesson last week when I was introduced to Indesign, I started to play around with it and by using my actual flat plan for my contents page I thought I would see how it would look like by creating the basics of my flat plan. I added in boxes of where my images would be places and a one big box of where my text would be placed. Here is what I came up with (so far):

1st step - front cover page

I decided which image of my model I would be using for my front cover page which as you can see is the one of my model wearing red. Why I chose this image to be on my front cover is because I thought the shot angel is a mid shot which is one of the conventions of Hip Hop/ R'n'B magazine covers that I have been researching on. Also because the eye level is looking direct and the camera which is effective as it looks more like the 'artist' is engaging with the readers.

I then used photoshop to make a start to creat my front cover page. As the orginal image as an effect of the background being faded from black to pure white (bottom right side going up), I thought this would look really effective as I would not have to play around with the background so much. I also wanted to see how an all plain background would look like. I did this by cropping the models image itself and pasting it on a black page. Why I did this is because I wanted to put both my potential front cover ideas together and see what makes a better background for my front cover. Here is what it looked like:

I asked my teacher Miss Silva and my class mates which one looks better and everyone had said the left one (with the faded background) looks better than the plain one.

From their feedback, I decided to stick with the faded background image.

Indesign

To help me create my contents page and double page spread, in class I was introduced something new which was a program called In Design. This program would basically help me create my contents page and double page spread with the use of the templates. Here is the tutorial video that helped me understand the basics of In Design.

Potential front cover images :)

I made my model wear two different types of clothing that were in my mind and from that I would assess which one would look better for my front cover page of the magazine. Here are the two images I decided that could be my potential front cover image:

As you can see, my model in both pictures is wearing red lipstick. In the picture where she is wearing blue and black, I thought I should make her wear something more red so it would match with the font I would be adding soon. So in my 2nd photoshoot which I took today, I made my model wear all red, with a bit of 'bling' shown by the gold necklace and hoop earrings. Hopefully, I would ask people about which one makes a better front cover image and take their feed back and from there I would decide which image I would be using in my final front cover page. 

My Inspiration - 

I mainly tried to follow (in my own style and use of colour) the 2nd magazine front cover image of Nicki Minaj and with the 1st image of KESHA, I used that for the format of where my text would be placed on my front cover page (as shown on my improved flat plan.)

Potential Fonts for my Front Cover

I went on the website called dafont.com and was testing out different types of fonts that could be used on my music magazine front cover. I had to look for fonts that looked 'Hip Hop and RnB' type so it goes with the conventions. I found a selection of different fonts and decided to put them altogether as a collage.

I have not decided which font I would use for my front cover, I probably will get people's opinions on which font for a title looks better and fits in more with my front cover image (that I will be editing real soon), and my genre itself.

Interview prep

Now its time to start planning and researching on the type of questions I will be using for my interview. I got given a sheet to start me off with planning my interview, here is what it included:

GENRE-

ü  What genre is the magazine?

ü  What type of artist might you be interviewing?

AUDIENCE-

ü  Who are your audience?

ü  What will your audience want to know?

PURPOSE-

ü  What information are you trying to get out of your artist?

FORMAT-

ü  How can you phrase the questions to make the artist give you the information you want?

ü  How many questions might you include?