A photo zine is a self-made, printed issue built of photos and captions. The term comes from the word “magazine”, as zines follow the style of magazines with headings, text, and illustrations put on a grid. An important feature of a photo zine is visual storytelling.

Inspiration

The inspiration I incorporated for my zine was taken from the photo above. I liked how the images looked with the boarder around them and replicated this in my own zine. I was also keen on the way they arranged their images, having their strongest image as the biggest and their most eye catching image as a smaller one since this distributes the viewers gaze.

In my zine, I would like to include these elements as well as adding my own personal touches such as increasing and decreasing the image sizes while rearranging them to get the best outcome.

We plan to centre our film around the Nazi Occupation of Jersey in WWII, travelling to different historical sites around the island, including the War Tunnels, various important bunkers and larger fortifications such as Mont Orgueil Castle in Gorey.

I want to use this task as an opportunity to improve my skills in techniques such as hyperlapses, which is a form of timelapse shot used to capture motion. We also hope to use Charlie’s drone if we can get it to work, as it would work really well for establishing shots of the castle. As I already take film studies as an extra subject, I think I have leeway when it comes to experimenting with these harder techniques, another one I want to try is the slow-motion feature on my phone’s camera, which has so far given me some smooth, high quality shots when messing around with it.

When we actually go to Elizabeth Castle, we’ll need to bring a tripod, a camera (phone camera should be enough but we might be better off using a proper one), and the drone (if it works). Otherwise, when we do our extra shooting, we should be alright with the same or even maybe less equipment.

For the audio on our short film, we need to bring a sound recorder and maybe make use of the boom arm if we’re shooting at the same time. We need ambient sounds of seagulls, the shore, and we might need to record some footsteps on gravel and stone. If we can’t get these on the day, we can make some sound effects with foley sound.

I am going to be making a zine from my images I took in St Malo, including some of the AI images I have generated from that shoot.

Narrative: a spoken or written account of connected events, a story. A narrative can also be told through a series of images which can tell a story. When creating a narrative through images the way they are presented have to be carefully thought about, for example: what order are the images in?, do the images have a caption?

What is my story?

All my images contain a subject which each have their own individual story. I am going to let the viewers create there own story when they look at the images as I think that some of the images can be interpreted in many different ways

How will I tell my story?

I’m going to tell my story by presenting my images from St Malo in a certain order in the zine, with each page representing one piece of the story. I’m going to vary how I present the images. For example, I may chose to put a single image on one page and on the next have multiple images.

I may also to have a look at some archived images of St Malo and add them in to the zine, to create a sense of nostalgia.

As I didn’t go on the St Malo trip, I decided to base my project on my brother who competed at the 2023 Guernsey Island Games. I chose to photography him during his events as well as the preparations he made and after the events to give the viewer a whole story. I used many different angles when shooting to make my images feel more engaging and to fully capture the image that I wanted to achieve. I think that many of my image turned out how I wanted them too which allowed me to create a zine with images that successfully show how his events went and what he achieved. One thing that I like about my images is the lighting. As they were both quite sunny days I think that that helped me to achieve the final results in the images which is what I was hoping for. I also thing that the colours in my images contrast nicely especially the red with the blue sky making for an eye catching image. Overall, I am happy with this project and think that with out context a viewer would be able to understand my project.

contact sheets: