Magazine process

Magazine ProcessesAfter researching the conventions of the ‘Sight & Sound’ magazines we started to produce our own magazine front cover. In this presentation I am going to illustrate how the magazine front cover has developed overtime.

Here are some 2015 Sight & Sound magazine front covers that we looked at to help us design our own magazine front cover.

Magazine DesignFirst of all we started to play around with the photoshop tools to get used to them. We watched Youtube tutorials to help us with this. I was familiar with using photoshop as I have had experience in using this software last year in film studies so this was very useful.

When researching existing magazine covers for inspiration we found that some magazines had a collage for the background rather than one main image. We thought this looked appealing so tried it out ourselves. We designed a collage for the magazine, taking various shots from the teaser trailer and laying them out on the page. However as a group we decided that this would not be best because the Sight and Sound magazines are almost always more simple and have just one key image. We also agreed that this made it look more like a poster rather than a magazine.

Instead, we tried another approach, we used the same image as we used on the poster. We found that this made it too similar to the poster so we used the same image but edited out the hands on photoshop so that it was just a mid shot of the main character; making it a different image altogether.

We added on the masthead on the ‘Octin Spraypaint’ font that we used in the poster and teaser trailer. We firstly chose to have this font to show that we have a brand identity but after looking at the Sight and Sound magazine covers we realised that they always have the same font as the anchorage text so we then changed this to fit accordingly.

Here you can see how we duplicated the image and then lowered the capacity to give it this effect.

We had to use the magic wand tool to get rid of the background on the image so that we could fill it.

We looked at images off google for ideas for a background for the magazine cover. At first we liked the image of the medication but then decided it was too distracting and took your attention away from the key image (the character). The background of the brick wall fitted really well with the theme because brick walls stereotypically give connotations of gangs, suggesting that the character is involved in some trouble. The brick wall makes her exposed and vulnerable to the audience because it is such a wide, open area and she stands alone. Therefore we decided this would be a good image to have as the background.

We went outside in our free time and took some shots of a brick wall outside Reigate Station. We uploaded them to photoshop and edited them appropriately. We made the image black and white and then lowered the capacity so it did not overpower the character in front.

At this stage we referred back to the research we did on magazine layouts to make sure what we were doing followed the conventions. Here you can see how we added the ‘Sight and Sound’. We lowered the capacity of the wall because we realised that it covered up the ‘International Film Magazine’ text.

When producing the white boarder around the magazine cover we measured a few of the Sight and Sound magazine covers and found that they were not exactly A4 sized, so we made sure that we had the same size as the professional ones.

We then wanted to add a surveillance camera. We used the magic wand tool to cut around the image of the camera and then made it black and white. It took a few attempts to do this because the camera was at first facing away from the character so we flipped it so it was looking at her. We preferred this because it gave more connotations of how she was being watched.

As illustrated on this slide you can see how we have then added the BFI logo, the bar code and the anchorage text. These last few things were quick to do apart from the text because we had to keep referring back to other magazines to check we were writing the correct text in the correct order.

We showed the magazine cover to friends at this stage and from the feedback we realised that we had made major spelling mistakes on the title. We learnt from this and changed it to the correct spelling.

This is the finished magazine front cover. We had audience feedback which I have explained in another entry on my journal. Overall I am very happy with the final product.