Magazine cover: Final product

After we showcased our products to our target audience, we received some feedback for a few changes that we should make to the magazine cover, these were:
1) To fit 'dark truth' into the triangle
2) to make the background more interesting

this is the final product we came up with in response to this feedback:

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:

Magazine sketch

At first, from researching other independent magazines such as 'Little White Lies', we decided to follow the same conventions used by using a main focal point. However, since our genre is horror, we changed the title and did the opposite which led our magazine to be called 'Dark Truth' to anchor the meaning behind it. To make it our unique selling point, we altered the shape to a triangle in order to not be too similar to existing independent magazines.

Magazine Influences!

We decided to look at horror magazines in order to get a brief idea of how we could create ours. Here are some of the magazines we looked at:  

We looked at a few Fangoria magazine covers and discovered that a lot of their main focal point were of the gory genre however this was in contrast to our supernatural genre so we was unable to get ideas for main images. We did like the layout of some of the magazine covers, such as having a mid-shot of the main image and the title just above in a bright red colour to stand out and catch the eye of the audience. It also connotes blood to show the audience that the genre is horror. The title Fangoria binds in with the genre of this magazine as the word 'fang' relates to vampires and vampires, which are conventional for horror films. There is also sell lines along the sides of the main image and is also a generic convention of a magazine. We liked the position of these and they are all about other horror films creating a narrative enigma for the audience.

Another magazine we looked at was 'Little White Lies'. This is a British independent movie magazine. All of the main covers for this magazine are very similar showing an illustration of the lead actor of the film. This shows how artistic and differs from all other magazines. The logo of the magazine is always placed in the center of the top of the magazine over lapping the main image and this is seen as its Unique Selling Point as no other magazine follows this pattern. The bar code is portrayed as cut in half within the logo which makes the audience and fans of this magazine familiar with it and so it is more recognizable. 

Little White lies - Independent film magazine analysis

Fangoria - film magazine analysis

Click image to view annotated version

Magazine Analysis