Subsidiary task – creation

of a film magazine front cover

Conventions of existing film magazine front covers:

•Some film magazines alter the house style according to the theme of the featuring film, for example having the actor dressed as the character in the film, using appropriate mise en scene in the photograph.

•Mostly, however, they seem to be a conventional front cover using attractive actors/directors dressed up and photographed similar to the photography in fashion magazines

•Often quite busy,with many cover lines

•Smaller framed photographs are common

•Cover lines drop names of films and those who work in the film industry

This is the photograph I began my magazine cover with.I chose this because the model looks glamorous, attractive and confident. Also the costume is conventional of a film magazine and the background is similar to the busy backgrounds often included on the front cover.

This model I will feature on my front cover was an actor in my trailer. Even though she was not the main character ,my storyline is that she is still a famous actor and would feature on the cover of a film magazine.

I need to do some cropping and editing!

Here is my image cropped and resized to A4. This is the first masthead I tried first. I superimposed the model onto the masthead to make it look professional and signify her importance and fame.

However, I don’t think the yellow stand out well enough and the font might be too thin for a masthead on a patterned background; it would not stand out well.

In this version, I edited the model’s skin using the airbrush tool to make her appear slightly more flawless, which is conventional of cover models.

I also altered the saturation levels as I wanted to create a black and white background,with a classic look.

The masthead I think is more conventional; film magazines often use fonts that seem quite graphic. The bright yellow contrasts well against black and white and the boldness of the masthead allows it to stand out.

I inserted a magazine edition and date, and the small writing on the masthead as the magazine is called ‘film focus’, yet it is more effective with a shorter masthead.

I added blue for the fourth colour in my house style as I think this works well with the other colours, and I included the main cover line about my actress and referred to my film ‘The Sleepover’ in it.

I added a smaller framed image of three young people who are supposed to be the cast of Skins – their outfits, looks and body image reflect the same messages. Skins the movie shows intertextuality, adding a popular existing text makes my front cover more realistic and more likely to be a successful product.

I added a barcode as this is essential to magazine front covers!

Due to the very busy, patterned background, I used a highlighter effect on the background of my smaller cover lines so that you can see the writing clearly and it doesn’t get ‘lost’ in the pattern. I wrote about popular actors in the film industry to fulfil audience gratification – audience receives entertainment and correlation from reading about people.

This is my final film magazine. In my opinion, this fulfils the brief well as it is conventional and features my film. The house style is effective and consistent and I think the layout of my front cover is very similar to existing magazine covers.