This document provides initial ideas and context for a final major project involving creating a magazine focused on ancient kings and gods. Some initial ideas included doing an animation, history magazine, or movie trailer. A mind map showed possible magazine topics like Alexander the Great, Rome, and ancient cities. Mood boards were created to establish stylistic influences. Strengths included being able to work on it from home, while limitations were that it is purely aesthetic with limited experimentation. Potential research activities included analyzing style of similar magazines, distributing surveys to identify the target audience, and interviewing friends and family.

1. Initial Ideas & Context
Your Name

2. Pre-proposal

3. Initial Reaction
• Could attempt to do a more complex animation. I enjoyed making the
sprites for the last project
• History/mythology magazine would also be relatively easy to do and could
be a lot of fun to make. I could also work on that more easily from home
• A movie trailer, could film scenes in back of museum gardens

4. Mind Map
Possible ideas
Magazine about
Kings and Gods,
easy to edit
images of statues
and frescos
Alexander, Rome, Sparta,
Athens, Caesar, Aurelius,
Xerxes, Ramesses
Movie trailer in
ruins, could feature
archeologist trying
to discover relics
Encounters
one/multiple Gods
and has interactions
with them

5. Mood Boards

12. Mood Board Analysis
Is there any repetition in the images you have collected? Repeated colours/images
styles/fonts/tone/mood
• Among magazines and depictions of rulers common colourings are red and gold,
especially in relation to Greek and Roman rulers, as the colour red was used as a symbol
of power and authority throughout most of the Greco-Roman world. The Laurel Wreath
also has a similar function, with ancient kings having golden wreaths to crown them.
Gold is also a fairly common colour among Egyptian Queen Cleopatra and Persian King
Xerxes the Great, and is a common colour of power and wealth especially. The large
cultural difference makes cities difficult to correlate, though most feature some kind of
temple to relevant Gods, such as the Colossus of Rhodes, built to honour the sun Titan
Helios, or monument to their Kings like the Pyramids of Giza, which house the tombs of
Pharaohs Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure. Most depictions of soldiers and warrior-kings
place emphasis on the shield, which was very culturally important especially in the
ancient Greek world.
This gives me a definite idea of how I want to style my magazine to fit the colour and mood
schemes presented by these depictions of Kings, their cities and Gods, perhaps designing
the front cover with Korinthian pillars to make it look like a temple.

13. Influence/Inspiration
• ”The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” is a book written by an English
historian called Edward Gibbon, published over the course of six volumes and thirteen years.
Volume I was published in 1776, and went through six reprintings, and Volume VI published
in 1789. It gives a detailed history of Rome and it’s decline, and even today is revered as an
excellent source to study the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Gibbon was one of the first
historians to effectively come up with major causes for the decline, pointing mostly towards
heavy barbarian invasions of Gaul, Iberia and Rome itself, as well as a gradual, sloping loss of
civic virtue among citizens of the empire. Gibbon also points towards the Christianisation of
the Empire as a potential cause for decline, and while not as major as the previous two
factors, points out the intolerance of Christianity compared to traditional Roman Paganism
and that the conversion of Constantine I and later emperors may have hastened the fall. This
was, for the time period, a claim unheard of, and his work came under immense attack from
Christian scholars and authors for another century. Overall, his writings are considered
incredibly important to modern writings about Roman History as
he came to a justified, reasonable conclusion about the Fall of
Rome which is still considered accurate by modern historians,
despite the lack of written sources.

14. Influence/Inspiration
• Perhaps one of the most influential historians of all time, Herodotus of Halikarnassos, to this
day, is regarded as the “Father of History”. Between his birth in 484BCE and death in 425BCE,
he wrote several of the most important documents of all time, perhaps most prominently is
“Histories”, which he wrote in 430BCE, which is regarded as defining the genre and study of
history in the entire Western World, and is still one of the most prominent sources for the
Greco-Persian Wars in modern day. It is separated into nine books (each named after one of
the nine Muses, Goddesses of Literature), and covers the rise of the Persian Empire all the
way up to the end of Xerxes I’s failed attempt to conquer Peloponnesian Greece and the rise
of Athens as one of the most powerful cities in Greece. It covers battles like Marathon,
Thermopylae, Salamis and Platea, giving detailed accounts of how many units were on either
side of each battle, and the events that transpired within them, with educated research and
analysis. Herodotus has been criticised for including some fantastical elements in his work,
such as opening the book by speaking of Io, Europa and Medea, as well as the abduction of
Helen of Sparta by Paris of Troy, however modern historians
have found his work on the Greco-Persian invasions as
remarkably accurate, so he is still held in highest esteem by
any modern historian.

15. Skills Audit

16. Why are you making this project?
• I am making the specific project as my FMP as of the projects so far I have enjoyed
creating and editing on Photoshop the most. I also think it is the easiest to get the
hang of and therefore may be easiest to create a higher-quality product from than
I could editing a video or creating an audio project, both of which I am not as
confident in the creation of. It plays to what I am capable of and what I will be able
to create with the most passion and quality.

17. Hopes for the FMP
• My main goal with this FMP is to create a passable production that could service
as a short, independent magazine that I can create to finish the course without
failing a project. I want the project to be visually appealing and similar to other
researched products, but also to have it’s own distinct style and feel focusing on
colour representation.

18. Strengths and Limitations
• One major strength of the project is that it is relatively easy to work on
from home on the project because I can delegate some slides to work on
at home and some to work on during college time. This allows me to
spend a lot of time on each individual page without too much stress.
• One major limitation of the project is that it is limited to purely aesthetic
pleasure, and while can be easy to create simple designs, higher quality
products may require much more time and research into better
techniques far out of my current skill level with the software. The types of
experiments I can do are also fairly limited.

19. Potential Research Activities
• Easy and effective methods of research would be to read through history
magazines and articles with a similar theme and take note of how the media is
presented and stylised to engage a modern audience, copying some of those
techniques with my own piece.
• I could circulate surveys on different social media platforms which would help me
narrow down not only a more detailed show of who my target audience is, but
also exactly what they want to see in the magazine so I can better specialise my
content to suit their wants.
• I could interview my family and friends in a similar manner to the surveys which
might allow me to get more detailed responses from individual people which may
help my project just as much with the wider reaching survey.