Magazine cover development

I started to develop the magazine cover by firstly by looking at the covers of independent film magazines, particularly at white lies, and found that many of the covers took a very abstract, surreal, artistic way in manipulating pictures to make them look like sketches and illustrations, which I thought looked very unique and I wanted to replicate that in our magazine cover.

We all then drew up some drafts for the general layout of the magazine cover, and in the end chose to incorporate aspects of all of them. We decided a central medium shot of the doll was the most suitable, with an upside down triangle as the basis of the logo which we all thought looked very unique and edgy. We also copied some aspects of little white lies with the half the barcode overlapping the logo. For the title we had also decided on 'dark truth' because it infers the horror genre with the word 'dark' and 'truth' helps suggest the magazine is reviews and rates films.

In the production stage, I started off by taking a shots of the doll at different angles and then picked one. I Then developed a template based on the feedback from the rest of the group. I started off by developing the logo, by creating an upside down triangle with the 'rectangle tool' and the 'free select tool' in the colour black. I then added the title using the 'text tool' and positioned it on top of the triangle, making the text a little bigger. I then right clicked the text layer and selected 'alpha to selection' and using the 'paint brush tool' coloured the parts of the text outside the triangle in white. I then decided that a black background would look better, so I inverted the colours of the layers (colour>invert).

I then began manipulating the image of the doll I had taken, I started by duplicating the image and going to (fliter>gaussian blur) and set the radius quite high. I then went to (colours>desaturate) with the setting lightness. I then adjusted the curves (colours>curves) so that the outline of the doll could be seen more. I then set this layer to 'overlay' ontop of the original image, and merged them together. After this I removed the background using the 'free select tool' and adjusted the curves, levels and brightness-contrast, so that the colours stood out more. I then pasted this into the magazine cover template. After this I duplicated the layer three time, on the first layer, I filtered it (filters>blur>gaussian blur) and set the radius very high, and i also set the layer mode to 'hard light'. On the next layer I set the mode to 'dodge' and then to the layer ontop of that I simply adjusted the opacity and colours until I got the desired look. Then I simply added the barcode and the text 'Annabelle' to the cover.

this is the first draft: