Film Magazine front covers

On our magazine cover we decided to have a photo of the protagonist from the film on the front cover.

There is also features of what to find inside the magazine as this links into what popular film magazines do too. We decided to use the picture of the protagonist looking sad as links into the narrative of the story but doesn't give the twist of the storyline away. However, looking back this may confuse the audience as it may not be what they would have expected from a horror film interview. Although, it gives an insight into the characters personality as she gets upset and takes it personally when she gets turned down by the boy she likes.

If I did the magazine cover again i would learn to use photoshop to a higher standard so I could use my time more effectively and produce a higher quality magazine cover.

We decided to re-do our magazine front cover as we felt and were told from feedback that it didn't look like a conventional film poster due to factors such as;

• the masthead is too small and doesn't fit across the top part of the magazine.
• The blocks of empty spaces should have been filled up with text and the text is predominatly on the top half of the magazine instead of being spread out evenly.
• Needs to include more detail about other films which were also being released.
• The edges of the image need to be edited more cleanly and less jagged.

Above is our revised magazine cover which we created using photoshop. To ensure our revised magazine cover would be better than the first, i simply googled 'photoshop for beginners' which came up with a number of links that would help me learn how to use photoshop to a better level.
such as; http://www.pegaweb.com/
http://graphicssoft.about.com/od/photoshoptutorialsbasic/Photoshop_Basics_Tutorials_for_Photoshop_Beginners.htm
http://www.photoshopstar.com/effects/cool-effect-for-your-designs/
I found the second link especially useful as it was a video link so it was visual making it more easier to understand. I didn't use all of the information i learnt from my research as not all of it applied to a magazine cover, however if I needed to use photoshop for something else then I would be able to apply my knowledge then.

We decided our magazine would be a horror based magazine to link into the successful horror based magazine Fangoria. We have shown its a horror magazine by the tagline underneath the masthead which reads "the ultimate horror magazine". The other films feautured on the cover are also up and coming Horror films (which i found by researching 'horror films of 2010') such as Daybreakers, The Wolfman and Piranha. Although, looking back we could have featured other low budget films such as Paranormal activity (Oren Peli 2009)as it is low budget is has similarites to our film.


We predominantly used black and red colours to signifiy blood and death which ties into the horror genre and the audience will associate these colours with the genre too. I applied alot of my research to the new poster by looking into the language used such as 'trouble on set' however, it may  be difficult for the audience to make the link between 'trouble on set' and the exclusive with 'A date from Hell'. Also, the majority of magazine covers had a 'must see movies section' so I added this to the magazine to make it look more realistic and it gives the audience a taste of what to find inside if it was a real magazine.
Overall, I feel the second magazine cover looks alot more realistic and has more similarities to actual film magazines. However, if I was to do the magazine cover again, I may add a 'film-strip effect' with a variety of clips from the film as this is commonly used in industry. I would also apply the 'rule of thirds' by having the features of my film on the right hand side of the cover, the picture in the middle and the general features of other films on the left as this follows the audience reading the cover from right to left while my cover is the other way around.
(see magazine research on link below)
http://johnson-lucya2.blogspot.com/2009/12/film-magazine-front-covers.html

Deconstruction of production of Magazine cover

• We took the photo for the magazine with a digital camera and uploaded it onto iphoto were we 'adjusted' the photo slightly to make the photo seem sharper and brighter to stand out more on the magazine cover.

• We then uploaded the photo onto photoshop and used the magic wand tool to edit round the characters face to have a plain background which we filled in black with the selection brush tool to fill in the background black.
•  This was followed by adding text to the cover in a variety of colours, fonts and sizes to make it look more appealing.

Whilst creating the magazine cover we wanted to use a font as the masthead to signify a horror genre such as a serif font used on the Fangoria magazine cover (see magazine research). After looking through the fonts available on photoshop we decided that we would download a different font from the internet which would fit our needs. We downloaded the font type 'bloody' from http://simplythebest.net/fonts/ which was a simple procedure which is what we used to write the title 'Kingdom'.