Assignment 3 Rework

The main aim of the rework as identified by my tutor’s feedback was to improve the narrative as it was unclear what the viewer should be looking at. It was felt than an objective viewer would not understand the aim of my series. A combination of my convoluted narrative and the layout hindered the submission.

A strong recommendation from my tutor was to give the assignment a title. I thought I had chosen ‘My Media Diary’ but this must have been so bland that my tutor did not recognise it as a title. I gave this feedback some thought and after reflecting on it chose to pick a song title ‘21st Century Man‘ that captured the modernity of media consumption. This title would reinforce the narrative and I felt that this change was a good idea.

My tutor had also identified that I had not followed up on his artist recommendations from previous assignments. This was a fair point so I decided to research Peter Fraser [15], one of my tutor’s suggestions. Fraser is a photographer using the mundane and everyday. His subjects carefully chosen and straightforward but include examples of nostalgia and use of colour. His work gave me confidence to amend some of the tighter close up images from my original set, including more in the frame. Interestingly his work also helped me go slightly tighter on some images to clarify the subject.

I took on board the feedback to use a text device to improve the narrative by using diary entries from a single day. The narrative would be one day, from waking up to bedtime. I initially thought I would need to reshoot some scenes but found I already had enough images to fulfil the story. The ‘CD’ story needed to be clearer so I replaced a wider table shot with a tighter Bluetooth headphones shot. For the ‘Book’ story I chose a wider bookshelf image to make it more about books.

I re-cropped and changed orientation to landscape for all of the images. Some of the images I felt where cropped too tightly such as the DVDs in the cabinet. By making it a wider angle I included the other DVD boxes which showed a collection rather than the viewer thinking it was all about ‘Shawshank Redemption’. I tightened up on the Amazon Alexa device to give less distractions.

As it was now a ‘day in the life’ series the five stories/chapters would be sequential. I over-complicated the original series by overlapping them. This was hindered even more by variations in orientation. I decided to keep the aspect ratio relating to the old media format but the narrative would be clearer by having a consistent orientation.

My final challenge was the layout in the eBook. I had already identified this as being a difficult process for me in the original submission. My decision for my reworked book was to keep all four images in each set the same size. I started and ended with two images on a page to give a consistent beginning and end – a days cycle.

There were other parings I wanted to keep on a double page spread, particulary the ‘TV’ story images with the Amazon remote control and ‘Sneaky Pete’. These I felt could be full bleed as was suggested by my tutor.

As I had started and ended with two images on a page I needed at least one other page containing two images. The result was to put a full ‘LP’ story on a two page spread.

Text positioning was also difficult as I had no rules or idea other than to not have text associated with every image. This added variety and also offered the viewer some space to read the images.

Here are my text and image selection for the reworked submission.

Diary entry 13/12/17

Overslept! Radio reception playing up so didn’t hear it.