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| Make Your Own Media | | By Gareth Branwyn for Screenager Central |
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Let's step into our handy Time Machine for a second, crank the date dial back to, oh let's say 1983, and see what sort of world of media publishing we step out into. Way back then, releasing your own music on a CD cost at least $10,000. Plenty of people had begun desktop publishing their own zines (small-run magazines), but the quality was low, and if your zine caught on in a "big" way (read: more than 100 copies), you spent most of your free time printing, folding, and stapling the darn thing. |
As for making your own movies? You could forget about that, unless you had a trust fund to draw on. Even as recent as ten years ago, things in the do-it-yourself (DIY) media world had gotten better, but you still had to have a decent size wallet to do anything even half-way professional-looking.
Back home in the present, things look positively 21st century. Thanks to today's digital technologies, automation, and a number of enterprising Internet-based companies, it is now possible to create just about any type of media while spending little more than your allowance money. Let's take a look at a few of the more innovative possibilities:
Making Music
It is the dream of many a teen to make music. Some of the greatest music of the 20th century grew out of young people just wanting to goof around with instruments in their garages. If you're musically inclined, you can not only make music, you can digitally record it, mix it, burn it onto CDs, and even make professional-looking CD package art for it, all on your computer desktop! All you need to record and mix the music is a microphone and music software such as Sony's Acid software.
Once the music has been tweaked to your liking, you can burn a CD using software, such as Roxio, that likely came with your CD-ROM drive. It's labor-intensive to burn the CDs, but you can be doing other stuff as you feed blank CD-Rs into the drive. I've done CD runs of up to 100 discs this way. To label your discs, you can buy special CD label paper at your local office supply store. It even comes with design software, and some label kits come with a little machine for applying the labels. Your creativity is the only limit on what the labels look like. Once printed and applied to the discs, you're ready to move on to the CD case (called a "jewel box" in the trade).
Any desktop design software, from Microsoft Word to Photoshop to QuarkXpress can be used for the box art. You'll need to make a cover (or a booklet, if you want to get fancy) and a tray card (the piece that goes behind the CD itself). Take apart an existing jewel box to make a template. Once printed on your PC's printer (use a nice glossy paper), you can cut out, fold up, and assemble the parts.
That's it! If you've done a careful and handsome job on the production, you now have a very professional-looking CD to hand out to family and friends, or even sell at shows, if your budding music career has gone that far.
[BTW: If you want to get really fancy, Epson has a printer, the Epson 900, that allows you to print directly onto your duplicated CDs. The results are amazing and will make your production look that much more professional.]
Making Zines and Comic Books
Since the Internet revolution hit and has spread to all corners of our society, the "lowly" desktop published print zine has faded away, as most budding publishers moved to home pages and weblogs. But this only makes a printed magazine cooler and more unique. And with today's well equipped home PCs and high-quality printers, you likely already have everything you need. The easiest way to get a professional-looking result with minimal effort is to create a zine that is 8-1/2" tall and 5-1/2" wide (a standard 8-1/2" x 11" piece of paper folder in half). You can "bind" the printed copies by using a "long throat" stapler (available at office supply stores).
One confusing part about making zines is getting the pages to "sync up" in succession when you put the whole thing together. To figure out which pages go on which sheet of the unfolded pages, make what's called a "dummy." So, let's say your zine is going to be 12 pages long when folded and bound. Take three sheets of 8-1/2" x 11" paper; fold them together into a little booklet. Number the folded pages from the front cover to the back cover. Now when you take the sheets apart, you'll see where each page of the final zine needs to go on each piece of full-sized paper.
To lay out your zine, you need little more than a word processing program that can handle columns and imported images (which nearly all of them do). Create your images in Photoshop, Illustrator, or similar programs, and import them into your layout. When the layout looks the way you want, print one side of the pages and then flip them over and print the second side. Make sure you're not printing them upside down! Now, invite some friends over, order pizza, and have a zine assembly party.
Perhaps even more fun than making zines is making comic books. Even though comics have found their way online along with everything else, there's something about a printed comic book that still appeals to people. Create your comic book as above. You can create the book completely digitally (doing the art in a drawing program like Illustrator), or you can hand draw the art, scan it in using a flatbed scanner, color it, add word balloons, etc. on the computer, and then print and assemble as above.
Making Books
Believe it or not, you can have a book published whenever you want. If you've got something to say, and a few bucks in your pocket, you can be a published author. It's called "on-demand publishing" and it's the wave of the future. To create your book, you can use whatever program you like, from a word processor to a page layout program such as QuarkXpress. When your book is done, you have to transfer it to PDF (Page Definition Format) before sending it to the printer. If you don't have Adobe Acrobat (the PDF program), you can get a free PDF-maker. Once in PDF, all you have to do is upload the files to an on-demand print house, such as CafePress, and order the quantities you desire. CafePress offers three binding types: wire-bound, stapled and perfect-bound. There's a flat binding fee (from $5-$7) and a per-page printing fee (from .045 to .03). You can get one book if you like or hundreds. How cool is that?
Note: CafePress offers on-demand publishing of just about anything you can think of, from T-shirts, mugs and mousepads to CDs, booklets and books. You can open up your own online 'store' (to publish and sell your wares online) free of charge and there's never a minimum quantity on any you wish to produce.
Making Your Own Movies
Okay, so you think you're the next Quentin Tarantino. Prove it! If your family has a digital video camera (they now outnumber analog vidcams in American homes) and a movie-editing program on your PC (all new PCs ship with such programs already installed), you have all the tools you need to be a desktop director. There's even a magazine, called RES, that's devoted to all-digital and desktop filmmaking. The RES folks also have a traveling film festival that visits major US cities each year, so if you really are the next Tarantino, your desktop masterpiece might be destined for the festival circuit.
BTW: If you want to be a true multimedia artist and combine your musical and directing talents, the DIY folk rock duo, The Kennedys (who make all their own vids), have published a book on low budget video-making called Make Your Own Music Videos with Adobe Premiere (Pete and Maura Kennedy, John Wiley & Sons).
These are just a few ways that you can express yourself using today's powerful and plentiful digital media tools. There's a media revolution out there and it's looking for new recruits. Do you have what it takes, soldier? Then what are you waiting for?
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