Magazine Inspiration

As my second ancillary product that I have to create is a magazine cover, I started to look at possible professional magazine covers to inspire ideas for my own. The  most obvious examples would be magazines such as Empire and Total Film, however I found that a lot of the overs of these were mainly CGI based which would not be accessible for me to do to a professional standard in the time that I have to complete it and with the lack of facilities and software I would need. If I would have had more time, it would have been a great learning experience for me to have a go at creating my own front cover with more artistic elements, but I decided to make mine quite simplistic for this brief.

To find the most appropriate magazine that would have similar conventions that I could create and allow me to draw inspiration from, I searched around and found a magazine known as; 'Film Comment'. After discovering the magazine, I visited the site for the magazine which includes many articles that delve in to all things film that are really interesting. Below is a link to the website;

                                                          http://www.filmcomment.com

The professional colour schemes and font have stayed the same throughout the years as Film Comment has developed and the layout has changed. I love the simplicity of the overall cover and it looks really effective with the magazine making sure that the image on the front was the primary focus to sell it to the audience. I noticed that the photographs for the covers in many of these examples shown above, appear to be action frames from the films the magazine is promoting that issue. I think that this is really effective and hope to produce this effect when creating my own cover. Also the main convention that really appealed to me was the extrapolation of the colour for half of the masthead from a colour in the image shown. As you can see all of the above examples have a specific coloured element of the "comment" of the masthead to pull out certain colours, in turn setting the overall theme of the cover. I will definitely try and replicate this idea when it comes to the production of my own cover.

Furthermore, after analysing other magazines such as 'Total Film' and research into these magazines, I found that they primarily focus their content on huge blockbuster films and as our trailer and overall advertising of our film has an independent feel underlying the inspiration, I came to the conclusion that our movie would not be advertised or featured on the cover. After considering this I thought it would be much more appropriate to do a cover that is more realistic in terms of our trailer and reflect what is probably more likely to be shown if our trailer was actually advertised professionally and so 'Film Comment' is the best option for all of these reasons.