Japanese Earthquake Zine - Final Spreads

 These are the final spreads of my zine. I originally did my zine on a black and white photocopier but it made everything much harder to make out so I did a colour version instead. These are the front covers of both as well as a spread showing the back and front spread.

 I then went to some establishing shots, I tried to show 3 of the main areas I edited, dividing the page up in thirds as I didn't want a page for every scene. I then took the images of the reverberations and showed two stages of the shaking starting and getting worse. I didn't split the page evenly to give a more chaotic feel.

 

 I then showed the groceries flying everywhere and the shaking stairs which then leads to a double page spread of the crack going up the stairs.

 

 I put the collages of the street in a wreck and the church crumbling together and then lead to the most chaotic images of the fires and floods. I wanted the most expressive pieces to be towards the end.

 

 In the black and white version of my zine this piece was the final page before the gravestone as I wanted a bit of calm, just showing the water in the city. However in the crit it was said that it was hard to make out what was happening in this image so I removed it for the colour version.

  

I'm hoping the colour version is clearer, if it isn't another idea I had was to put quotes from newspapers but I wanted to avoid this as I wanted the audience to reflect on the images without text. One idea might be to put a page at the front with quotes and then go into the images, maybe having the scenes of calm before this.I feel I should have also focused on a clearer narrative and more noticeable stages, I started to show graduation from calm to the shaking, destruction, the fire and flooding and finally the gravestone but I could have made these stages clearer. I could also have considered the use of different media as I think using oil pastel towards the end was effective and I think I should have worked on slowly changing how much I edited and what I edited with. I was hoping the title of 8.9 was clear enough, which may be the case this close to the incident but when there's been a greater gap including the word 'magnitude' might help. 

Japanese Earthquake Zine

 Our next project is to create a zine using photographs taken at various locations. I wanted to relate my to the recent earthquake and tsunami in Japan. I went around my area taking pictures with the intention of editing them to make it appear that an earthquake occurred in Harrow, bringing the disaster closer to home.

 I took photos of cracks in the ground with the intention enlarging them and using them to make massive cracks in the ground. I took pictures of buildings and streets to show them in rubble or on fire.

 

I then printed some of the images to experiment with. I firstly tried using oil pastel and marker pen to create chaotic images. One was showing a tree falling on a train and causing a fire. I also took the image of fruit and veg and cut out the boxes and some individual pieces of fruit to make them appear as if they were falling. I really liked the outcome of this so tried it with a crumbling church.

 

 

I also used acetate and tracing paper to copy images and then move the acetate over to give the impression of shaking. I also went over images to show the rubble and debris that would build up as well as the water from the tsunami flooding in. I also experimented with ripping the tracing paper and photo below.

 

I took the images of stones and cracks in the ground and created a collage of a destroyed street. I used oil pastel again to show both the tsunami and a building on fire. My images were both based on typical imagery associated with earthquakes as well as images on the BBC News website from Japan.

 As the last page I intend to use the gravestone from the pictures above and for the first page I want to use the image below which is 8.9 (the magnitude of the quake although some places state its 9.00) written in cracks in the ground.