FILM MAGAZINE COVER

ANALYSIS OF MY FILM COVER



RESEARCH
On beginning to research ideas for my film magaine cover, I gained inspiration from a variety of popular film magazines such as Empire, Entertainment Weekly and Total Film. I researched the magazine covers that featured Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Thor Ragnarok and Blade Runner 2049. This enabled me to discover the conventions that are often used in Magazine Covers in order to be able to emulate such conventions in my own work.

This was greatly beneficial as it enabled me to form ideas about the kind of detail that I should include in the Magazine Cover for my film. For instance, the magazine cover for The Last Jedi was beneficial in inspiring me to use only the main protagonist stood solemnly in the centre of the frame for my magazine cover.

PLANNING:
In order to create my magazine cover, I have been researching a varity of well known film magazines to gain an idea of the magazine cover conventions that I must use for my film magazine. I decided that my Film Magazine will be entitled Shoot!. The reason I chose this name was to convey the term widely used for practical filming. My Magazine Cover is heavily inspired by various Entertainment Weekly magazine covers, primarily its August 2006 cover featuring Hugh Laurie in character as Gregory House in the main image. My magazine cover will feature the protagonist (PI Andrews) in the main image with a gun in his hand, looking towards the camera and taking up most of the space on the cover.


In order to construct my magazine cover, I carried out a photoshoot to attain the main image against a white background so that it is easy to photoshop other images onto it. As most magazine covers use a Rule of Three when it comes to main colours, I will do the same, with my three colours being black, white and yellow. I decided that my magazine cover will also feature genre conventions such as direct address, a tagline and additional information about the film.



CONSTRUCTION
After deciding on what would feature in my Magazine Cover, I went to do a photoshoot (the same one for which I captured the original image for my film poster). After taking various pictures of myself in various poses, it gave me a great variety of choice to use for my Magazine Cover. These pictures can be seen below

The image that I decided to go for was a simple midshot of myself standing against a white background, with a look of steely determination on his face and a gun in his hand. I decided to use this picture because it was clear and plain, meaning that it would be far easier to edit any text around the picture in photoshop.

After inserting the original image (pictured above) into photoshop, I decided that I would need to increase the contrast of the image as it was extremely grey and bland to the eyes. Feedback from my peers inspired me to make this change and it resulted in the magazine cover looking much more visually appealling than before. Seeing as I wanted my magazine cover to look as professional as possible, I spent lots of time researching fonts that I can use that replicate those similar to fonts used in magazines such as Empire.
EDITING:
Editing was the most time consuming of the processes for the magazine cover due to the amount of edits that needed to be made to the image to make it a convincing magazine cover. I needed to come up with a name for my Magazine Cover and decidewhat features the magazine would have, so I decided to call the Magazine Cover 'Shoot', to replicate the shooting of a film. Feedback from my peers for this title was positive, so I decided to keep it in.
I decided to include familiar magazine cover conventions such as Decks and a main image, with the protagonist in the centre of visual interest.

As pictured above, I used a variety of different fonts to stand out against the white background and thus make the cover much clearer to the audience to read. The choice of including previews towards the left came later in the editing stage as I felt that the Magazine Cover looked too bare. After gaining inspiration from the previews in various Empire magazines I managed to put it in with reference to the upcoming Oscar nominated films for 2018 to give my magazine relevance to the audience.