ZINE

My final Zine can be summed up in three words: "Supernatural Car Chase."

It's a take on the classic car chase. In my scene, mysterious government agents (colloquially known as The Men In Black) are chasing down a trio of aliens. After an intense chase scene and some foreshadowing involving vines, a group of tree spirits intervene and use their tree powers to allow them to escape. I had the agents driving stereotypical black SUVs and the aliens driving a red pick-up truck. The bright red truck stood out well against the dark greenish backdrops I used in most of my Zine.

Some of what I was originally planning was hard to translate from my head into digital images. I spent a lot of time searching up images of forests, black Cadillac SUVs, and red Ford F-150s to find the right ones. I had to do a lot of creative framing to get the look I wanted and to avoid repetitive scenes. Adobe Photoshop's background removal tools were extremely helpful to add the cars to my scenes quickly, and to incorporate in the aliens and men in black so that they appeared to be inside the cars.

I used Photoshop for the car heavy scenes. For time, I used relatively simple backgrounds, mainly adding some things to the sky and adding filters for the mood. I created the aliens and men in black in Illustrator. I was able to easily import my illustrator images into Photoshop, and I kept individual characters on separate layers top get them to fit together the way I wanted. I created templates for the men in black to minimize how many of them I had to make in Illustrator. I also made the back and front cover in illustrator, which tells the story-that the aliens crashed, found a car, and ran from the cops.

Overall, I was happy with the way it turned out. I would have liked to have spent more time on the vines to make them look a little better, but given the amount of them I needed that ended up being time-prohibitive. I was very slow with Illustrator and Photoshop, although I definitely got faster as I progressed.