AICE Media Studies Blog - Jorge Rosell

This is my Feature Spread for my magazine (2 pages put together). I used certain techniques to create meaning, and that meaning is unification (the bond shared by these two lovers in the spread.) To commence, for the main image, I wanted to make a drawing of both artists from the cover together in a picture. However, I also didn't want to draw a picture of them which was taken from far away (medium shot/long shot), so I decided I was either going to do an extreme close up image or a normal close up image. Ultimately, I decided the latter option (normal close up) would make the most sense, since it would capture the artists' faces as well as just a portion of their torso. In the picture, I wanted to get one where both artists were smiling and perhaps holding each other in some way (holding hands, etc.). My aim was to portray to my audience (the viewers/readers of my magazine) the joyfulness of both Anuel AA (right) and Karol G (left). In my feature spread drawing, not...

In this blog post, I will talk about the planning process of the cover, the creative process, pictures of the production, sense of branding, and my use of digital creative tools. My planning for the cover was standard-procedure.  As can be seen, most of everything that I planned to do for my cover ended up in the final product. I feel the cover was probably the easiest to plan compared to the feature spread and table of contents pages. For the story board/mood board, I feel back then it seemed as though it was more music/instrument oriented, and it was all over the place in the sense that there was no clear genre of music I was showing, artists, etc. In the mood board, I have artists like Drake and A$AP Rocky (contemporary rap/hip-hop), Tupac (classic hip-hop/rap), Stevie Wonder (R&B), Paul McCartney (Rock), etc. Now that I designed my actual magazine, I focused on one genre that I am familiar with (Latin Music/Artists) and also incorporated the gossip as...

This is the cover page of my magazine. I used a wide range of techniques to create meaning in it in many ways.  One thing I did for the Main Image(s) is I made sure to use pictures to draw which were either Close Up or Medium shots in order to solely focus on the artists rather than having their whole body and the photo being most of the background, which is what I am not trying to represent. For Karol G (drawing on the top), I did a Close Up to really imply allure, attractiveness, and glamour of the female artist. The drawing encompasses features like her hair, face, eyes, etc, and bears a striking resemblance to the Rolling Stone magazine featuring Jack White's picture on the cover which I researched: For Anuel AA (drawing on the bottom, under Karol G), I did more of a Medium Shot to show his body language (clearly, the picture doesn't move, but the drawing was from when he was in concert, and his body is kind of in a position where one can tell he was moving, da...

In these two pictures, the first one is the unedited picture, the second one is "in the process" of being edited, and the second one is after I edited it. I not only added a depth of field effect using the iPhone XS's Portrait Mode, but I also corrected the lighting by adding a "Studio Light effect" (That's the name of the effect on the iPhone, and can be seen in the 2nd picture).  Like this, you can see more of the actual setting/background itself and is more luminant. On the TOC and Feature Spread page for one or two of the Rolling Stones' magazines, it also had this effect and also had a depth of field edit/blur to it, so that's why I did it here. I added a depth of field blur effect to emphasize a focus on the discs in front of the camera, and then the plants in the background, etc. were not in focus because it is not what I am aiming to represent in these photos. For the Anuel AA and Karol G digital renderings I am ...

Here you can see the pictures I took in my house and outside in my backyard of the Latin music CDs which I plan on having in the TOC page that I will design. I have more pictures but for now I think these are the best. As for the picture/drawing of Puerto Rican rapper/singer Anuel AA, it takes an extreme amount of time, dedication, and patience to get one of these done so for the blog post I only did one, and again, I got this idea from The Rolling Stones magazines which I researched (codes and conventions, etc.) I did my own style to it which is very smooth and solid.

For my photo shoot, I plan on taking pictures of Latin music CDs here in my house (not the actual CDs, but maybe have them stacked up) so that I can talk about maybe the impact of Latin music in America or something like that. Also, another location will be my computer, since I plan on doing digital renderings of famous Latino Artists. For my equipment, I will simply use my smartphone camera and maybe the Portrait Mode that the phone has (it basically creates a depth of field and I could use it to maybe focus on a stack of CDs from Latin artists while the blurred/out-of-focus background is the outside of my house or something.) As far as models go, there won’t really be models. Since it's in the front/inside of my home, the CDs will be the main object/subject. Also, I guess my other models will be the digital renderings/drawings of the Latin artists.

For my photo shoot which I plan on doing, my concept is to go outside my home (front yard maybe) and take stills/professional photos of the outside AS WELL AS having Latin Music CDs stacked up and focused on, since my magazine will be talking about music and artists (specifically, Latino  artists). I could then (in the magazine) talk about how Latino music has impacted here in the US. However, not all of my pictures will be actual photos taken on a camera device. I actually plan on doing digital renderings of actual famous Latino artists (Bad Bunny, Karol G, etc.) and hopefully they turn out good enough for what I aim to accomplish with my magazine. For these types of pictures of the famous artists, since I can’t use a picture simply from the internet, I will trace over a picture of said artist in photoshop and add my own style to it. I think the idea of actually having a cartoon rendering of artists is very interesting and I got my idea from Rolling Stone magazine, the magazine th...