Production diary

1. Production Diary

2. Week 1
This is the first week of doing production. Because most of my zine needs to be made on photoshop which I
don’t have at home and I am only in college for two days a week I started immediately and tried to get as much
done as possible to make the most of my time. The things I can do at home I will but the majority of my work
are the illustrations which I am going to start with. I am starting with the illustrations because they are a main
part of the zine and will take up the most time and I need to be careful so can’t rush them. I created the pages
on photoshop before copying it a page at a time all into InDesign for printing. I decided to do this because it
will be easier for me to edit the page as a whole on photoshop instead of having to constantly move and try to
edit individual elements in InDesign. It will also be easier as I can edit the images on photoshop but to change
an image on InDesign I would have to delete it, change it on photoshop and then re-upload it to InDesign
which was not only extremally time consuming but I had to do that for even the tiniest detail which was very
inconvenient. So I didn’t get confused which page is which I numbered the pages in photoshop the same as if I
were going to print them as a booklet which I regret doing now. If I had numbered the pages in order so 1 and
2 were next to each other, which you can do in Photoshop and import into InDesign in the order to print it out
like a booklet it would make it easier because I would have been able to look at the story in order instead of
having page 3 and page 14 next to each other confusing the flow of the story. When I started production I
started from page 2 leaving the front cover blank. I did this because I already had some of the basic character
designs which I was going to use inside the zine as I made them in my development process. Because of my
idea development I already had the style, colour schemes, the story and I had a clear image of what I wanted
the illustrations to look like in my head so all I had to do was draw them. To make the illustrations I start with a
basic scribble of the general position I want the characters to be in then I created a new layer and go over it to
get a final image. This made it easier to relate them because even if they were different characters they all
have the same basic body shape so I just changed the colour and some details to create different
characteristics.

3. Week 2
This is the second week of production. Last week I tried to get as much done as possible and am about a third through.
The illustrations are very time consuming and I am getting confused which ones I need to do next and what they will be.
At the start of the week my plan was to complete each of the pages in order before adding the text but it was easy to
loose track of which illustrations I needed to do next so I added a rough version of the text to give some structure to the
zine. It made it easier for me to visualise the drawings when I knew the story. As the week went on I failed to do it in
chronological order and my order of illustrations became more sporadic, and I sometimes just made whichever
illustrations were easiest to make at the time. This made it quite difficult to keep track of which ones I had finished and
which ones I still needed to do so I referred to my notes and my script a lot. Before production started I already had a
good idea of the text I was going to include. In the brief I was told I needed to include an interview in my zine. At first I
was stuck at what to do because my original idea was to have separate stories on each page so it would look out of
place. My final ideas were to include it in a story or to have it at the end and have it like I (the creator of the zine) was
being interviewed about the zine. In the end I decided to include it in the story and I think it worked well. I added the
text directly from the edited version of the script which was coloured and labelled which page they would be on. I
created guides and rough sketches so I had a clear idea of what was still missing and how I wanted them to look. Now
all the text is finished and all of the drawings I need are laid out. Next week I just have to finish the drawings.

4. Week 3
This is the last week of production and is the week I finish my fanzine. I planned to have a full day on Monday
finishing my drawings and the two half days printing and finalizing. This didn’t go according to plan and ended
up using all my time finishing my drawings. When I had finished all my drawings and text I erased all my
numbering, guides and rough sketches and looked over my piece one more time. I printed it out at home
which I found really helpful to see it as a physical thing and not on a screen to see what I had missed and
what I could change. In the rough print out I found a lot of spelling mistakes and slight details I missed. I took
notes on the rough version and when I got back into college I compared my notes to my zine and corrected
the mistakes. When I finished my zine I saved each Photoshop document as a JPEG and imported it into
InDesign. Because I laid out the pages the same on Photoshop (so if you add the two page numbers together
it would equal one above the total amount of pages) as they are in InDesign I could save two pages at a time
and it was easier to import them in the right order. At first I saved the pages as screenshot but they turned
out too pixelated so I changed them to JPEGs to get a smooth image.