Creating Props

Hey there Cambridge!

IT'S TIME TO FILM!!! After so much planning, I am finally commencing with the actual filming of my film opening. I did remember though that I first have to create my magazine prop. This is the only prop that I actually have to create. Other items, like the janitor's towel and phone are already prepared, of course.

There are multiple steps required for making this magazine, so I am organizing this post into each step. 

1) Find a magazine

Original magazine cover

I am only creating a cover and two pages on an article about the life preservation company for my magazine. I did forget to take a picture of the original LifeExtention magazine; however, I added an image of the exact issue I found online to the right:

I found this magazine laying around my mom's house and used it as the base for my magazine.

2) Taking pictures for the magazine

My magazine will have an image of a life preservation participant (janitor) and the company owner. I named the owner Jacob Grunt, a name that once again just popped in my head for the character, and he is illustrated as my dad. I used this image of him (to the right) in a suit and put it through remove.bg to remove the background and paste his figure onto my magazine.

The image of the janitor I had to create on my own. I laid a white sheet in an open area and the participant wore white and laid asleep on the sheet. I used a blue led light to make it seem like the participant is in a lab or being freezed. Next, I used an app called Peachy to smooth out the wrinkles in the image. Check out my process in the video at step #4 and before/after of the edited images below.

Before (A)

Before (A)

Before (B)

After (B)

3) Creating magazine cover

For the cover, I came up with the name WonderWorld for the magazine name and the issue is of course March 2001 to adhere to the context of my film. 

Below is the evolution of my magazine cover (from first creation to final cover), which I edited on Canva. At first, I pictured the cover would include an image of the life preservation participant (janitor) and the company owner (Jacob Grunt), but including the owner just looked incredibly weird... so I made a quick choice of removing it.

1

2

3

Final

Here is a screen recording taken while I create the cover:

Here is a more random image of me choosing a barcode:

4) Creating the article

The article had to have a few specific words that I will do an extreme close up on in my film opening, like "freeze", "successful", "preservation", and "15 years". Writing it was simple though, I just talked about the life preservation company, the owner, and even added some dialogue I made up. You may read the article below:

Here is a screen recording taken while I write a portion of the article:

5) Pasting my printed cover and article pages onto a tangible magazine

Using my printer, I was able to print all three images. I used glue tape to attach these pages onto the magazine. Check out the video below to see me do it! (Glue tape is super helpful for those of you who like to scrapbook!! It makes it so much easier to glue images or other things onto a page.)

https://new.express.adobe.com/publishedV2/urn:aaid:sc:US:a332ee63-8a6a-4b5f-a10a-18b59bb226b7?promoid=Y69SGM5H&mv=other

Reflection:

This whole process of creating the magazine prop took lots of time, but was still easy to create! My biggest challenge was definitely getting images of the life preservation participant (janitor) since I had to make a whole setup, take nice images, and upload the image to Canva. That part of this process required the most complication and energy. I like how my magazine and article turned out (I hope you got a chance to read it in the images above). Thankfully, I remembered to add a barcode to the cover and dialogue to the article, it made it much more realistic.

Yours Truly, 

Macie 💗