Charlie Atkin evaluated the effectiveness of their research for an FMP project on a fanzine about the film Hot Fuzz. Their survey of the audience helped them understand which elements would be most appealing. Contextual research on film directors and posters also provided inspiration. For the fanzine, they experimented with different techniques in Photoshop but initially drawing over stills took too much time. Layout and formatting went well in post-production. Time management was an issue, as was balancing work and school. Stress was also a challenge but the experience taught valuable lessons about using time effectively.

1. FMP EVALUATION
AND FEEDBACK
Charlie Atkin

2. Evaluation (Effectiveness of research) ?
I think that my research was fairly effective in the areas that I needed to do and one of the
things that really helped me in my research was the survey the I did to get to know my
audience a bit better and understand which elements of my project the would enjoy more
and want to see more of.Another thing that my survey allowed me to do was create a
primary and secondary target audience that I could use to my advantage and use codes
and conventions to make my product appeal to those target audiences as well as the
product that I wanted to create myself.
Another thing that helped me in my research was doing my contextual research as this
allowed me to understand the area that I was looking into and what sort of content would
be appealing to the audience for this topic. It also helped me to get into the minds of
some of the biggest industry minds in film and media. From directors such as Steven
Speilberg to the films themselves, likeAn AmericanWerewolf in London and then onto
the posters from the amazing Drew Struzan who created iconic artwork such as the poster
forTheThing.

3. Evaluation (Methods Used and Missed Opportunities) ?
For this fanzine I planned on using my laptop that has a touchscreen to draw over still images
from Hot Fuzz but after creating one of these images within just shy of a week and then when I
looked at the timeline for when I needed to have the project done by I decided to leave this
idea behind and start to look into other techniques in Photoshop that I could use to create a
similar effect and use less time so that I had more time to format and layout my fanzine.
For some of the pages I decided on having a different approach to the text and images that I
wanted to use. In my own time I have played the Borderlands franchise and when they
introduce a new character the use a intro screen that I have always liked and though were a fun
way to introduce a new character and give you an
insight into the character, so I decided to use a similar
method and technique on my images to introduce main
characters in the film. One thing that I think I missed
was the very stylized nature of the introduction screens
from Borderlands whereas mine are much less stylized.

4. Evaluation Final Concept ?
The Final concept for my fanzine is a homage to EdgarWright’s Hot Fuzz, if my fanzine
was a real product it would be part of a trilogy of magazines, I also think that in terms of
the fanzines that I make I could also look at different film franchises and pieces of media
that I really enjoy and create more and more fanzine projects for different films. I think
that the final concept for my project was a good idea but would have been better as the
full set of magazines that I would have made if this was an actual venture for me, I would
have created a fanzine for Shaun of the Dead andTheWorld’s End as well and I think that
the fanzines would have been much better as the full set and then there would be the
consistency throughout all of the fanzines.Other than this I thought that the idea was
good and with a few more tweaks to content could have been much better.

5. Planning, what went well, what didn’t ?
I think that for my planning two of the main things that I wanted to focus on went really
well, these were the Blood and Ice Cream font and the art style for the fanzine. I decided
that for my fanzine I would call it the Blood and Ice CreamTrilogy of fanzines and that
name worked very well as it is the main alternate name for the CornettoTrilogy.This also
allowed me to manipulate the font type in many different ways to help assign the font
type to the specific film, such as changing the colour of the blood font to blue forThe
World’s End, and changing the colour of the ice cream and the toppings on the ice cream
font to be more akin to the cornetto flavour for the film. I think that the thing that went
the most sideways with my planning was the weekly plans that were in the planning
document as I planned to do a lot more stuff such as making a full website and more
content.

6. Production, what went well, what didn’t ?
For my production there wasn’t really a lot for me to do, I did about of weeks work of
researching the film, watching interviews and watching the film with and without the
directors commentary and learning about the film so that I could convert interesting parts
of the film into interesting small bits of text that I could then add to my images to help
enhance the whole experience of the fanzine.The majority of the work that I had to do my
project was post-production and I spent the majority of my production weeks spent in
Photoshop playing and manipulating the images to see what I could create.
I spent a lot of the time in the project jumping between the different formats of the film,
going from the script to the normal cut of the film to the directors commentary to learn
everything that I could about the movie so that I could make the magazine a great visual
journey as well as a good factual fanzine so people could learn small things about the films
that they might not have picked up on.

7. Post-production, what went well, what didn’t ?
For my post-production I felt like the majority of it went well as the bulk of the work was
just editing the images and using different filters and adjusting the lighting layers to make
the final images look their best. Most of the work that I had to do was mainly layout and
making the double page spreads look the best with the text layers that I had.
I think that largest thing that didn't’t go well was the first method I had of converting the
images from still frames into my own artwork.The first method was very slow and time
consuming and I think that if I had continued with the manual drawing method I would
have lost a lot of time to it and I don’t think I would have finished the project on time.
I then had another issue of transporting around all of the files as I wanted to make sure
that I was carrying the same copy of the film around with me so that if I every wanted to
get more screenshots of the film I would have a consistent quality of images and there
wouldn’t be much difference between the images.

8. How you dealt withTechnical Problems ?
I didn't really run into many technical problems, the only technical problems I ran into were all
quick fixes such as missing font files and other more smaller annoyances that weren't really
major and had a quick fix, one of the things that I have found is good to have is a better naming
system for files as sometimes tracking down a file could be very time consuming if the file
wasn't named what I thought it would be and this could throw me off.
Other than that I had the issue of moving around the files from college to home so that I could
continue working but that was fairly easy to figure out by using cloud storage as well as a
physical storage drive so that I had redundancy if anything were ever to go wrong.
One of the larger technical problems that I ran into was the time that it took me to create my
artwork on my original method, this method was very time consuming and when I changed out
my method I was much better off as the only things that were slightly time consuming was
waiting for the layers to be applied and the final image to be rendered.

9. How you dealt with Management Problems ?
When it comes to management I didn't really have very many problems as my project was
a solo endeavor so I didn't really have much management to worry about the only real
management I had to worry about was time management and making sure that I was on
time and made good use of my time in college and out of college.

10. How you dealt withTime Management ?
Time management was one of my major issues with this project, I felt like with the time
that we had in college I hadn't really made the most of it, there were times in my project
where I wasn't making/creating anything and looking back I have realized that I spent that
time creating my content I would have had more time to myself to finish off my other
documents and not spending lots of time at the end of my project finishing off products
instead of touching up and improving my work.
If I had spent more time working on my project instead of getting side tracked my project
would have been more detailed in my documentation and I could have utilized the Copy
document that I made that had lots of information about the film that would have worked
very well alongside the artwork that I created.
I wish I would have also been more motivated on mornings as a majority of the time
towards the latter part of the year when nearing the end of my course I began to be later
to the first lesson of the day and this lead to more time being lost and not being able to do
as much work in a day.

11. How you dealt with Emotional Problems ?
The main emotional problem that I faced in my FMP Project was stress, I found the FMP
stressful as for one thing it was the final thing that I would create and was the main bulk of
my final grade from college, so I wanted to make something that I could be proud of and
that would give me a good grade after the two years that I have been here.
I then also had to balance working alongside my FMP, as I wanted to work enough to be
able to pay bills as well have money left over but this meant that it cut into my free time
that I could have otherwise repurposed as extra time for college work creating more
artwork or finishing documents but working ate into this time and made it very difficult to
work from home as my mind would always be somewhere else instead of thinking about
college.This work/school/life balance has shown how difficult times can get but it has
taught me important information in the form of that time management is critically
important to getting things done and I think if I could redo this project now I would use the
better time management skills that I have now to make my life easier.

12. Does your product meet your intentions ?
I think that my product meets my intentions that I set about for it to do. Even if the product
wasn't exactly what I wanted it was a really great product that I enjoyed making and really
enjoyed the final product.The product was also what I intended it to be as a more visual
representation and look through the entire film.
I think that in terms of my final product that it could have been a little bit more informative and
that if not due to time restrictions of needing to meet the deadline the extra information would
have greatly improved the magazine and that in it’s current state the fanzine is more of an
artistic journey rather than the in-depth look at Hot Fuzz that I wanted the fanzine to be
originally.
Originally I also thought that I would make a much shorter fanzine and create multiple fanzines
as a trilogy much like that of EdgarWright’s CornettoTrilogy, but after the fact I have now
realised that this may have potentially been possible but I have a feeling that the fanzine would
have looked rushed and I now much prefer the longer fanzine that I have created as it looks
much more quality compared to something that would have ended up shorter and potentially
more rushed.