halfanhour-blog2

[halfanhour-blog2]

The Industry Panel Pitch

Jack H:

Who/Target Audience - Jack H Character of Book/Front Cover - Josh Scanned Pages/Content - Jack B Moving on From Here - Jack H

So before we moved into the pitch, we wanted to jot down just a few topics that we wanted to ensure we speak about in an organised and collected manor. As a group we decided four topics would be enough time of formal speaking to keep it short and snappy, allowing us to move onto the less formal part of the pitch.

After we showed the Kickstarter, spoke what we had to say (non script) and finished off with the gif, we then lay back to relax and try and spark a conversation based environment.

It’s hard to say how well It went but they definitely had a lot to say and therefor hopefully a lot of interest. It was really interesting to see how deep these two industry experts look into the field. Seeing things about our project that we hadn’t even thought about. We learnt a lot in terms of the industry, how to play it, how to behave and move forward from what we have, to a potential issue based future venture. They did say they loved the design.

[halfanhour-blog2]

Finished Gif

Jack H: In the end we went with a gif that is quick, dark has edge and carries the characteristic of the group through to this medium.

[halfanhour-blog2]

Finished Kickstarter

Jack H: After some nice feedback from Sam and Lucy, we re shot the original footage in the new room with the better equipment. The new Kickstarter has a confident and quality feel to it; avoiding the cheesy generic Kickstarter we wanted to avoid. 

It hosts a mixture of found footage in the form of video to set the tone and panning still images of the finished document to mix up to content. The images change according to what I’m saying so hopefully people can follow along easily enough without the need for the subtitles that we had on the original.

The video finishes off with the PENN logo and the halfanhour publications logo, this is hopefully clear enough that we are halfanhour and not too confusing with the title of the publication. 

[halfanhour-blog2]

Kickstarter Development

Jack H: Today me and Jack B found a new location still in the business school, that we can shoot the footage for the Kickstarter again. After obtaining equipment from the AV store including a point and go mic, the image and audio should be good enough quality. However there was an issue with hiring boom mic’s or even just a clip on, but without looking into the footage we won’t know yet.

[halfanhour-blog2]

Draft #3

Katie: This is the third draft of our book. This draft had a few errors as the paper wasn't right. We chose a thicker stock to experiment with yet it led to pages coming loose from the spine and altogether feeling too thick for a magazine, it wasn't easy or smooth to turn the pages. Also with this stock the images especially ones with a lot of black produced really high contrast which we thought was a bit too much and in your face. 

[halfanhour-blog2]

Crit Session #3

Clare: Today we had our dry run pitch with Sam, Lucy and the other Encryption group. We began by sitting round the table and presenting our kickstarter video, A1 mock up poster and our second printed mock up for the book. Jack H took the lead in presenting our design concept and explaining what our intentions were and who we aim to target with our audience. We all then contributed with parts we felt comfortable talking about, which could have been better planned out, as Lucy mentioned at the end. We started our presentation by showing our kickstarter video, which wasn’t completely finished but showed a rough idea of what we intended to do. Our feedback on this was what we expected, with adding more footage behind, i.e. prison archive videos. We then showed our first original mock up vs our new mock up, showing our progress to Lucy especially, as we haven’t shown her any of our work since the initial 3 ideas pitch. The progress we had shown from both publications demonstrate how we took on board our last feedback and worked to change the design. Our feedback on ‘PENN’ was really positive, we just had minor changes we needed to make for Monday, which was spelling errors and alignment of text and images. Our A1 poster showed our front cover of our publication but with the police incident form filled in. This worked really well when blown up to a larger scale and the feedback from Lucy and Sam suggested that this was a strong advertisement. However, we did have minor criticism on our logo. The tutors were unsure about the scribble across the type. They thought that the scribble should be over the form on the poster and show the type on its own, establishing that this was the publication. We will take this into consideration for the development of the poster, but as a group we did prefer the scribble over the logo.

[halfanhour-blog2]

Errors

Josh: We have been testing Perfect Binding but have had some problems with pages falling out. This could be due to not enough glue applied but the thinner paper stock seems to hold together a lot better. 

[halfanhour-blog2]

Kickstarter Script

Jack H: Me and Josh spent a while writing through a script that would say exactly what we wanted it to, ideally we would have had more time so as I could learnt he script and be able to say it without it seeming like such a... script. However none the less it seems to be ok and not THAT obvious that it was.

“Prison life is an enigma to the public, most of us only knowing what we hear from documentaries and the media. It’s a criminal underworld hidden behind bars where resourcefulness and tricks of the trade are the only way to survive. From nail clipper tattoo guns to lamp cord kettles, prisoners will utilise anything and everything in order live the normal life they lost the right to lead. Penn is an insight into the shocking truths of prison life. For the first issue, we have met with several ex-inmates from prisons all over the UK who have opened up to us about their time in jail and what convicts really get up to behind bars. We plan to push Penn further to other areas of the world, exploring the differences within prison life between various cultures such as South America, Eastern Asia and Eastern Europe but we need YOUR donation to do so.“

[halfanhour-blog2]

Draft #2

Katie: This is the second printed draft of our book. For this book we chose a paper stock called Cyclus offset 100gsm which we bought from Fred Aldous. The paper had a newsprint like feel with a cheap and rough aesthetic which fit perfectly to our prison content. 

There were a few printing errors as the black pages were printing in different shades of black. After looking into this I discovered it was because the images were cropped then over another black background when on screen it appeared the same but printing it was not. I converted all the black pages into their own separate pngs so it would act as one flat image and this later solved the problem. We noticed a repeat of one of the prison hand drawn notes on the same spread also in the bottom left image which we will remove. 

We decided the titles should be matched in line with the text so this was another thing needed to be changed. As well as the numbers on the contents page needed to be more spaced so it is clearer to read. 

[halfanhour-blog2]

Gif Development

Jack H: Here are some designs which are quite similar for the GIF, we are quite happy with how these have came along but we want to explore further. Something a bit more edgy or fast paced to match the characteristic of the publication.

These GIFs show a nice way to smoothly bring the title of the publication in with a prison based feel. Originally the GIF just started off with the title having the pen scribble onto it, this was quite ncie as it was short sweet and looped really well, however Lucy felt like it just needed something more.

[halfanhour-blog2]

Kickstarter Draft

Jack H: First draft of the Kickstarter has been done. It doesn't include any image or video yet but that’s under consideration. The video was shot on the fourth floor of the business school in a busy corridor with pretty terrible acoustics. However we did get the core correct, we knew after meeting with Sam and Lucy that we would have to re shoot the footage, but we were happy with the basis. I think the group had an understanding of what It will look like when it’s finished with the logo, music, videos and images of the document all together.

[halfanhour-blog2]

Full Bleed Images

Jack H: One of things we as a group decided on, was to break up the content in the book by having a few or so full bleed images relating to the content past or before it. The idea here is that it will break up from all the reading the view could potentially be falling into. Otherwise if they are skimming then these will be impacting none the less, striking black and white images to get bring to life what the prisoners are talking about. Alcohol Straining and the Stinger.

[halfanhour-blog2]

Logo 

Josh: Here we designed a logo for our group, (final logo largest with border). which we feel that this logo is sophisticated and high class. 

Katie: As PENN is our main focus we just needed something small as a publication reference if we were to produce future books. The font is sophisticated and fits the numbers of half an hour, its nice for the contrast of our urban rough book to open with a neat and proper logo on the first page. 

[halfanhour-blog2]

Paper Stock

Josh: Today we tested different paper stocks and found that the unbleached, raw looking stock suited the character of Penn best. 

[halfanhour-blog2]

A1 Poster 

Jack B: We are basing our A1 poster on the design of our book cover. As the poster is a larger format we are planning on adding information to the scrunched up sheet with finger prints and hand writing. because the poster was going to be blown up so much more than the book we had to remake the form from scratch as the form we had previously downloaded was too lower quality, in doing this we were able to manipulate some of the writing changing, prison fingerprint form” to “Prison Induction Form” to fit in with the theme of our publication and modify the red writing to the colour and tone that we wanted.

[halfanhour-blog2]

Type Options

Jack: in responce to some of the feedback we received from the tutors, we have decided to look at other options for our font choice. we have chosen Helvetica as it works well as a base font that we will be able to design with now and have the option to change it later on in the project. For the numbers we are using Century Schoolbook because it works well with the contrasting san-serif

[halfanhour-blog2]

New Layouts 

Katie: After our feedback so far from the tutors we knew we needed to create more content leaving us with more text in order to make a fuller layout. I took on the task on redesigning the layouts to fit a more typography based design. I used the same indesign document given by josh with the how to pages content still there but now began to develop the pages to suit the bigger amount of new content.

I created a grid of 10 by 10 in indesign and followed it strictly so the layouts would all be structured in the same format. The two typefaces used were Helvetica for the titles and italic captions and Berthold Akzidenz Grotesk for the body. Each spread was now filling up and became more interesting to read. I stuck to a three or four row squares width columns for the text throughout the book so it would be consistent. 

I aligned the text ragged right as this is the easiest for the eyes to read across a page with vast amount of text. I used the tracking feature to control the ragged side keeping within a -20 - +20 margin. This controlled how neat it was visually on the page and allowed me to check for widows and one word begging the sentence at the end of the rows.