Most school magazine projects use stock photos and a layout tool. This one started with a messy 3D-print model of a fictional car, rebuilt it into more than two hundred organized parts in Blender, painted and lit it like a studio photograph, rendered and composited final images into brutalist print-design magazine pages that look like they were distributed free in the garages of a dystopian future city.
It was a Year 12 A-Level Media Studies foundation portfolio. The concept was a promotional car magazine for the Type 66 Avenger, a vehicle from the Cyberpunk 2077 universe, aimed not at corporate executives but at Night City street racers, ex-corporates, and mercenaries. The magazine had to feel like it came from inside that world.
Planning Angles before Modeling
The most important production decision happened before any modeling work. I determined the camera angles and page layouts first, then scoped the 3D modeling to only what those shots needed. The underside of the car, the engine bay details, and anything that would never appear in a render were left unfinished. That decision saved weeks of work and kept the project on schedule.
This is a planning principle I carry into everything now. Knowing what you need to produce before you start producing means you can skip everything that will never be seen. A shot list is a scope document.
Rebuilding the Car
The base was a downloaded 3D-print model of the Type 66 Avenger, chosen for proportions only. It was messy, untextured, and not suitable for rendering. I separated it into more than two hundred logical parts, rebuilt most areas, named and organized everything so materials and rendering could be handled properly.
The material system was built from scratch using Blender's node editor. Roughly fifteen custom shaders covered the surfaces that mattered: car paint, metal, brushed metal, plastic, smudged plastic variants, glass for windows, glass for lights, rubber, and carbon fiber. Each material was tested under different lighting conditions before committing. Building shaders felt like visual programming, and small adjustments to roughness or normal maps changed how surfaces read dramatically.
Lighting was done in Cycles with physically oriented area lights. Kelvin values, light size and spread, exposure, and beam control were tuned per shot. Complex scenes used up to seven lights. Test renders were kept small and frequent to manage render time and resource load, committing to full resolution only after everything else was locked.
The Photoshop Craft
The renders entered Photoshop as raw material. From there, the pages were built through dense compositing: layout and typography, motion and iris blur, posterize and threshold effects, glow, grain, film burn overlays, fold-line textures, page numbers, spec tables in fictional Eurodollars, slogans, fictional corporate disclaimers, barcode-like details, and Street Cred references that tied the copy to the game world.
The design language deliberately challenged magazine conventions. Traditional car magazines use clean layouts, high-key lighting, and glossy photography. This magazine used dark matte backgrounds, aggressive typography, distressed textures, and heavy grain. The reference point was underground zines and industrial brutalism, not luxury brochures. The font system mixed Highrise and Allowing Freedom for display type with JetBrains Mono for technical specifications, all selected for non-commercial licensing safety.
A key lesson from the editing process was the danger of over-texturing. Pushing grain, film burns, and threshold effects too far made pages illegible. The discipline was balancing grit with readability, and that balance required comparing every page against the style guide and references, not trusting the effect in isolation.
The Complete Output
The final magazine was six pages: a front cover, a contents spread, two double-page spreads, and a back page. Each page had a breakdown animation showing its Photoshop layers revealed one by one. The process blog documented twenty-eight posts across research, planning, production, editing, and four creative critical reflection essays covering conventions and representation, audience engagement and distribution, development of production skills, and integration of technologies. One CCR artifact was an animated infographic poster designed in Photoshop and animated in Premiere Pro.
A risk assessment written before production anticipated software instability, knowledge gaps, time management failures, and creative direction risks. That document kept the project grounded when render times stretched and Photoshop files grew heavy.
What I Take from it
This project taught me that creative production is a pipeline, not an act of inspiration. The magazine exists because the research, planning, modeling, lighting, compositing, and reflection were each given their own stage and treated with discipline. The final pages are the visible output. The process is what made them possible.
