Editorial brief 1 - Portrait of an Anarchist

We were asked to being a magazine or newspaper from a specific list so we could later on analyse them for different purposes. I brought 'The Nursing Times', I merely chose this because it was the cheapest magazine I could find but later on realized it had an influence on what I wanted to do. At one point during the session, our tutor said ''Did you find anything in your magazine that you were surprised to see?'' and I had done. My magazine was full of images of nurses posing happily, mostly just head shots and I found the occasional piece of medical equipment but the one image that did capture my interest was one of a ballerina. I saved this image and stuck it on the wall after the tutor asked us to find interesting images to show the rest of the class. The image was so interesting because it was aside a piece of writing about healthy posture. Out of all of the bits of medical information I had seen in that magazine, I didn't once stop to read about it apart from the information beside the ballerina image. I thought using the ballerina along side something related in the sense that ballerinas have good postures yet unrelated in the sense that an image of a ballerina is not medical, was a very clever and interesting technique to get a reader to stop and find out what the article was about. I kept this ballerina image as inspiration but now it has seemed to have been misplaced. Later on during that session I accidently came across another image of a ballerina, this time in 'The Sunday Times'.

This time, the article was about ballerinas and how strenuous their dances are and how much impact the body receives whilst they're dancing. All of these findings about ballerinas were starting to become that of a 'sign' for me so as it was our first briefing and I was excited to crack on, even before knowing what our first upcoming assignment was yet, I thought I knew that I wanted to do something ballerina related no matter what.

The brief we were given could hardly have been more opposite to relating to ballerinas. 'A Portrait Of An Anarchist.''. Obviously the first thing that came into my head when hearing the word 'Anarchist' was the punk era and I couldn't stop thinking about Johnny Rotton. After getting this out of my head by doodling silly pictures of 70's punk stars I began thinking whether or not I'd be able to include my initial love for the ballerina idea into this anarchist theme. The days went by and I was slacking a bit because I was too caught up on trying to think of ideas of how to create some sort of 'Anarchist Ballerina' idea until I expressed my 'what seemed to be plausible, some how' idea to my brother who immediately burst out laughing and disgraced my ambitious plan...My initial thought to his response was ''I'll show you, I'll find an anarchist ballerina some how'' but then I thought about how silly I sounded so gave up the idea all together! I guess I'll save the ballerina idea for a more suited brief.