Motivation / Personal Interest & Description
Global context: Personal and Cultural Expression
Inquiry question: How do age and cultural identity play a role in shaping film preference?
My goal: To design & create a 'professional' magazine exploring how age and cultural identity shape film preference by asking people between the ages10-100 about their film preferences, conduct interviews as to why, and review them myself.
-
Something that makes my project 'personal' is that it contains interviews. This means people needed to give opinions and express emotions, which is about as personal as it could get. Additionally, it is personal to me because I really love film and I thought it would be interesting to challenge myself to also look at films from different eras/cultures that I might’ve otherwise not been aware of.
-
I had learned a bit about review writing in the past, but not much. This meant I had to do extensive research for that, and for magazine design/layout as well. Due to all these things, I definitely felt like this project would be really interesting but also a challenge to complete.
Have 8 different people/8 different films.
Design and formulate a google form with different questions aimed at gathering information regarding the people’s thoughts and feelings behind the film.
Have each person explain their thoughts and feelings by filling out the google forms (or in some cases conducting an interview over the phone).
Include a picture and blurb for each person.
Edit the pictures to have similar formats/filters.
Include a review written by me for each film & find a way to respond to parts from their interview.
Include a 'conclusion' based on my findings at the end of the magazine.
Design the magazine (layout, format, cover, written parts, photos, etc.).
Get it professionally printed in a 'real' magazine format/coffee table book.
Process Planning
There were multipel steps I took in order to complete the planning phase of my project:
-
Research: I spent quite a while researching not just about film review writing but also magazine layout. For film review writing, I looked at what made a successful film review and read tips about how to write them. I practised by watching films and writing short reviews. This helped develop my knowledge on cinematic terms and elements. For the layout, I tried to experiment with different colour schemes and patterns, as well as looking at real life examples of magazines for inspiration.
-
Planning/Organizing: I developed the age ranges I would interview, and spent time trying to find people of different ages as well as nationalities. Due to Coronavirus restrictions, I felt it was best to conduct my interviews online, via Google forms. I worked a lot on figuring out what kind of infromation/answers I wanted to get from the participants, and through that developed the questions I would ask. After editing these, I implemented them on a Google form. Before actually sending it out to the participants, I did a test run with a few other people, to ensure I could get feedback before actually sending it out in order to get results.
Process Taking Action
Here were the steps I took in order to actually complete my product:
-
Sending out the form/receiving results: After creating my google forms I sent it out to the participants and received my results, I looked for patterns between answers. From this, I wrote my final conclusion, also helping to answer my inquiry question.
-
Watching the films: Overall, for this project, I spent more than 18 hours watching films. I had to constantly be paying attention, writing notes about characters, setting, dialogue, interesting cinematic effects and more.
-
Writing the reviews: After watching the films, I expanded my notes and tried to stick to writing in relatively the same format as well as including roughly the same elements.
-
Designing the layout of my magazine: I implemented my research in this area, as I started to develop and design my layout. I thought about colours, fonts, images, and more. Additionally, I wrote my introduction and finished my conclusion based on my results.
-
Printing: One part of my criteria was to have my magazine printed in a professional format. This meant I had to go to a magazine printer to create my magazine. Unfortunately, this format cannot be appreciated due to online exhibitions, but luckily the PDF version of my magazine can still be seen below.
Click here to see the PDF version of my project:
