When considering my magazine cover, I had many different ideas for the picture that would feature on it. When filming, we decided that the best looking picture would be one like the one featured, and so we took many similar photos of this one. There were some subtle, but important differences in these photos though. We started with the shutter (behind me) all the way down to the floor, but then decided that it looked too plain. We then moved the shutter up, but realised that if we had this new addition of light coming through at the bottom, we should do something with it; with this in mind, we put the hammer featured in the film down next to me as it is a fairly big part of the trailer - this could hint at what is in the film/trailer for some readers of the magazine. Finally, we also had my character not looking at the camera, so that it looks almost as if he is scared of something not visible to the audience - this would help convey the genre of the film.
The original, unaltered picture that was used in my Magazine cover.
After deciding on the photo I wanted to use, I took it into school to use Photoshop to edit the picture effectively. It took me a little while to get used to the different features of Photoshop, however I eventually understood each tab and how to make it look like I wanted. I installed the same font used in my trailer for the film's title - as this created synergy and many film magazine's do this too (for the exact same reason). Many different magazines all show their price in a smaller font at the top on the front cover. This is so the potential reader can see how much the magazine will cost, but after reading most of the other text and possibly generate interest in buying the issue. Also there were a lot of issues of different magazines that featured different sections of the magazine on the left/right of the front cover. This gave the the idea to do the same and have different sections of the magazine being described on the right of the cover. This is so that if a potential reader is unsure of whether to get the magazine or not, this will hopefully engage them more and they will end up buying it. Finally, some issues of Empire had a block at the top/bottom of the cover for other features in the magazine to be put in, I liked this and tried to put this in my original cover.
An example of the layout of an Empire magazine front cover - with different features on the right and the title of the main feature on the left.
The blocks at the top and bottom for other features being used effectively by Empire magazine.
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My original cover.
After creating this and receiving feedback from the class, I decided that the cover was too light and the white block at the top didn't suite the cover at all. With this in mind, I looked at other issues of film magazines for ideas - in many issues of Empire that I looked at, the main characters take up most of the front cover, to the point that they usually overlapped the title of the magazine a little. This suggests that the magazine is so well known that they don't even need to have their title fully showing on every cover, as well as making the film seem like the most important feature of the magazine. I did the same with my improved version of my magazine cover, in the hope that it had the same effect. This was quite hard to get the hang of on Photoshop, but after watching some walkthrough videos on Youtube and asking friends how to do it, I managed to get used to it.
An example of an Empire front cover that has certain parts of the characters overlapping the text.
So I managed to put my head in front of the text for the magazine cover, however it was still too light and some text was hard to read because of this. I spent a little while playing around with the contrast and brightness of the whole picture and manged to achieve a darker 'tone' in the picture. I still wasn't happy with it, until I stumbled upon the idea of blurring the image behind the text and having me as the only thing that was clear in the picture. I found this amazing because it made the text stand out so much more and made me focus on me more than the other things in the picture. I marked around me and the hammer on the floor, so the rest was blurred out a little to make the text stand out - creating the final product (at the top of the blog post). I felt that the cover looked a lot darker and more menacing, while also highlighting the different features inside the issue, and so it is a massive improvement on the original version.
