Twenty-One

I had my first go at mocking up an article, and printing it. I decided to go with my idea of a twist on page 3 - The Sexy Page 3 Spud, as it will contain a doctored picture, so I get to have a play with that too.

Okay, so here we have my real one as reference. Or one of my references anyway. I've used a couple of different page 3's to get some variance. I thought it was best to censor it. I also cut the top of her head off. Not because that was rude too, she was just too big for my scanner.

So the first step of making my own was to make my page 3 girl. Who incidently is a potato. With a Bikini on. So I set to work peeling a swimsuit into my tasty tatty.

Isn't she pretty

So now I had to start mocking up the layout of the page, using the real page 3 as a guide, trying to copy the typefaces and styles as best as I could.

The potato looked a bit odd by itself so I thought I'd put it on a nice beachy background, blurring it a little so it looked like the depth of field.

I printed it out using my inkjet printer to see if it would work. Which it did, nicely. This is a scan of what it looks like, after being strategically placed in my bag for a day so it got a bit tatty round the edges.

I'm so happy with the way this turned out. Despite the fact it's obviously not finished as it's just a test, it's starting to look really real.

Twenty

Today I had my tutorial with Frank. It answered a lot of questions.

I have now had all the feedback I need to decide over my political/humerous dilemma. I'm definitely going to go for the humerous. I feel so much more comfortable doing this. The idea of writing competely serious-toned stories, taking a political approach, and fooling people without a trace would have been a clever way to do it, but I much prefer the other idea.

At the start of this project, my focus was just on making people believe the things I told them. Since then I have also become interesting in spoofing the media. Pointing out its controlling side, it's ridiculous side, the side which blows everything out of proportion and how it itself tries to make people believe stories, and react a certain way to them. With the humerous route that I have decided to take, I still get to fool people like before, it's just this way I get to have fun with it, and push the boundaries more. My articles will still look real. This will do a lot of fooling. Frank has also helped me decide to start off my stories seriously. The progressively get more ridiculous. Which does a little more fooling.

By doing this, I am confident that when people see my work, they will still be asking the question 'is this real?', even though the story is completley crazy.

So I guess that's the turn my project has taken, I'm not wanting to pull the wool over people's eyes completely anymore, I just want to see if I can still make them question the lies, no matter how ludicrous they really are.

I have also decided that I am definitely going to do a mixture of full articles, clippings, and headlines on sandwich boards. This is because of the difficulty of printing, and for variety. I do love the idea of having these stories displayed in a way that looks like somone's collected them, and lovingly organised them in a tatty, amateurish way.

One more thing that I have been thinking about, after a few attempts at trying to write some stories, and finding it a little hard to write in the style of a real journalist. Even though I feel pretty happy writing, it has never been my strong point. So I asked myself: Does the language have to be perfect journalism? I think with the nature of the stories, I don't know if it matters so much. Obviously it needs to seem like it's from a newspaper, but I think if it seemed as though it was written by one of the more rubbish journalists at the newspaper, I think it would only add to the charm. However I have got The Newspapers Handbook out of the library. It has shed a lot of light on style of writing and stuff. It has literally everything you need to know about journalism and newspapers in there, it's actually quite amazing. So hopefully I can make these stories as good as possible.

So a very short summary of today would be:

• Format decision = mixture of clippings and headlines
• Style decision = far fetched
• Language decision = good but not perfect

Nineteen

Today I had a chat with Rob. We talked about another change in the format of my project. It is now an option to do a mixture of full articles, clippings, and headlines on sandwich boards.

The way I would like to display this is as if it's somebody's collection of news that they had gathered and organised. There's something about the tattyness and lightness of the newsprint that I plan to print my stories on that I want to keep, and this will be a perfect way to do it. I'd like to be able to display them on a pinboard, as if someone has pinned them up to study.

Seventeen

This week I have been thinking about what sort of stories I will write - coming up with vague subject matters, and twists on existing sections, some which reflect my newspaper research, some which really don't. Some are really outrageous. At this stage I'm still not sure whether I should go for the serious approach, or the piss-take approach.

Part of me wants to take the light hearted route, as feel a lot more suited to this kind approach, as most of the stories I have come up with have just naturally been quite ludicrous. This part of me wants this to be funny. I actually want to make people laugh. But then does that mean I have to sacrifice some credibility?

The other part of me wants to make these stories believable. Completely believeable. So people could read the whole thing and not bat an eyelid, and just walk away thinking it was true. Then I would have successfully conned them. But I kind of feel like that isn't the most important thing anymore. I feel like I've moved on from the whole 'making people out to be fools' thing.

I will get some feedback on what people think about this, and the story ideas I have so far, and make a decision, because right now, both ideas seem like they could work so I'm reluctant to ditch one.

I have now started a whole new book, just for story writing, as it is a big part of my project. I will use each page as a seperate little space for me to build each story on.