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Finished Magazine Cover

Clare: Above is our finished magazine cover which we are extremely pleased with. I have created a Prezi to demonstrate my analysis of our finished magazine cover and all the elements in which we included to make it a successful piece.

Magazine Cover Editing

Clare: We started out our editing process using Photoshop, the same programme that we previously used for our film poster. Since we had taken photographs of our protagonist both covering her face and then a usual portrait image with her face being completely shown, we could merge the two together. I uploaded both the images to Photoshop so that they could be viewed in two separate windows. I then selected the area of the uncovered image around Anna's eyes, and dragged them onto the photograph of her hands covering her face as a new layer. Since this was created as a separate layer, it allowed me to erase the unwanted areas around the actual eyeball and lashes, leaving literally just the shape of her eyes on top of her hands.

Now that I had completed this part of the editing process, I made a new blank, white canvas with the right dimensions of a typical A4 magazine cover, as we wanted to make our magazine cover look as professional and exact as possible. On this blank canvas, I imported our magazine logo and placed it at the top of the canvas. This is because from doing previous research on Empire and Premiere magazine designs, we discovered that on a typical cover the title was placed behind the main image, and the image covered it a small amount.

I then imported the image I had created on another canvas and placed it as a new layer on top of our magazine title, in a similar style to other magazine influences for Empire. My next job was to zoom in close to the outline of the photograph and erase the unwanted background that was from our original picture. This was a long process, however, in order to get a precise outcome this editing part was essential. 

I also edited the vibrance and saturation of the photograph to give it that paler, more ghastly effect. This made Anna's character appear drained and empty looking, reflecting her feelings inside.

Afterwards, I used the 'dodge tool' to make Anna's eyes appear brighter to catch the attention of the viewer immediately. They now seem a pale baby blue as opposed to a darker colour, in pattern with the overall pale and white colour of her face.

Now I proceeded onto adding in all the various titles and extra pictures onto our magazine cover. Keeping in mind that we wanted to attract a younger audience, I remembered to keep the main titles very trendy and aimed at what would be in their current taste e.g. the new release of the Hunger Games franchise. I also remembered to vary the font style to keep it new and exciting and add some bright colours to attract their attention.

I used the font tool box to adjust the sizes and make the main title 'Through My Eyes' stick out from the other sentences. It also allowed me to browse through the various font types and decide which ones would be best suited for our cover. The options also allowed me to change the font to bold which would drag in a lot of attention, or italic to make it appear fancy and professional looking. The screen grab to the left demonstrates the many layers that I ended up with after the text process. 

Magazine Cover Name and Design

Magazine Name

We have to come up with a main magazine name before we can proceed onto the making of our actual magazine cover on Photoshop.
Below are some name and font ideas which we plan to use for our magazine:

Font
Clare: Looking at other fonts, we are aware that we need our title font to be big and bold so that it is eye catching and grabs the attention of our reader. We must also be aware of our target audience in terms of style and colour, as we want to make sure it is appealing to them in particular. 

Amanda: If we were targeting women, we could use a less thick, bold font, being less harsh and bold and becoming softer. Below are some influential examples:

Clare: A noticeable pattern that we have discovered from these film magazine logos is that they all seem to stick to the red, white and black colour theme. This is a clear signal in guiding our colour choice for our own magazine cover. 

Amanda: We also noticed that no other magazines (cooking, tv, music) use the colour red in their title. We want our title to include red, to symbolise to readers that it is film based.

We want to had decided to look at different fonts for each word, with the first word much smaller and in lower case and the second word a bolder, larger font and in a different colour, in a similar style to our inspirations.

Below are some examples of the fonts we like: 

Above is our finished title for our magazine cover. We kept the look very simple and remembered to include both the colours red and black to fit the stereotypical theme of a film magazine cover. The font we chose is quite trendy and appealing to our target audience because it is bold and a bit playful as opposed to just plain and boring.

Name

Clare: Since our film magazine is aimed at a younger age range, (between the ages of 12-25) we need to keep the magazine title simple yet appealing. We have discussed as a group some title ideas which we are considering and have thought of in response to the various influential pre-made and successful magazine names e.g. Empire. Most teen magazine titles only contain two words maximum, being short and snappy.

Below are a list of name ideas:

• TEEN film
• filmTASTIC
• film NOW
• more FILM

We have decided to go for the magazine title 'film NOW' which will be a teenage friendly film magazine, and have decided not to use the name 'TEEN film' or any other title using the word 'teen', otherwise it will restrict our reading audience. The word 'NOW' emphasises and urgency, and dramatic element to our film magazine.

Magazine Design

Clare: We have decided to use the idea we had previously for our main film poster of our protagonist Anna covering her face with her hands and her eyes being edited over her hands to demonstrate us "seeing through her" and from her perception. This idea was influenced by the photographer and artist named Giuseppe Mastromatteo who I am also studying for my Photography A-Level and have therefore gained the inspiration from this other brief I am focusing on which was really beneficial for our group.

Clare: Above is a drawing that I did of our magazine design. It includes the main title of the magazine at the header 'filmNOW'. It then includes the price and date in smaller sized font below it, so that the viewer is drawn to the cover before they notice how much they are required to pay. The main illustration is centred in the middle of the cover, covering a slight area of the title. We have also made sure to include a barcode at the bottom for selling necessities. Since this is a teen film magazine, I decided to add tags such as "UK'S BEST TEEN FILM MAGAZINE" and "HOT TOPIC FILMS" to demonstrate to the reader who the target audience is (teenagers between the ages of 12-17). To appeal to our target audience, we made sure to include a free gift inside, typical of many teen magazines. The free gift includes a Hunger Games poster, which is highly favourable to teenagers in this current time as the second film has recently been released. We also tried to sell the magazine by including what is inside the magazine, including a fun film quiz, an interview with famous actor 'Aaron Johnson', reviews on the latest films and top film soundtracks that were selected by readers of the magazine.

Which Magazine Cover?

Clare: Before we create our magazine cover, we must firstly research into which magazine is most appropriate for our target audience. Below are some magazines that we have researched into.

1)

                                                                                              

Empire magazine is owned by Bauer which is the largest largest privately owned publisher in Europe, publishing in Germany, France, Spain, Portugal and the United Kingdom. Additionally, Bauerpublishes in the United States and Mexico. 

According to this chart, the main genre for Empire magazine is males, as it is categorised underneath 'Men's Entertainment.' The Bauer website also states that the audience is 76% male, meaning a less amount of women read the magazine, therefore it would not appeal to our target audience as although we would encourage a unisex to watch it, it is most probably going to be preferred by teenage females as our protagonist is also a girl.

Going by this research, Empire magazine is not the best magazine to exhibit our film on, as the main target audience appears to be men.

2)

                                  

Premiere was an American and New York City-based film magazine published by Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S., between the years 1987 and 2007. The original version of the magazine, Première, was established in France in 1976 and is still being published there. After researching into this film magazine, I realised that it stopped publishing in 2007, therefore wouldn't be usable for us to use as a template for our cover. However, we do like the actual style of the premiere magazines as it is of a similar style to EMPIRE with the huge title being wrapped behind the main image, giving an almost three-dimensional effect.

3) 

Total Film is a UK-based film magazine published 13 times a year (every four weeks) by Future Publishing. The magazine was launched in 1997 and offers cinema, DVD and Blu-ray news, reviews and features. Total Film is available both in print and interactive iPad editions.

After researching into the audience type for Total Film magazine, I discovered that a higher percentage of males read it than females, similar to those of the Empire magazine. The average age was also 26 year olds which is out of our target audience range. Due to this audience profile, it is evident that this magazine won't appeal to our personal target audience, so we cannot use this as a template either. This is unfortunate as it has a UK central geographic and aims to highlight British film and industry talent, which would have been beneficial for our film as it is British. 

Clare: In conclusion from this magazine demographic research, there isn't a pre-made magazine that appeals to our film or target audience of teenagers. So, we have decided to create our own independent magazine to exhibit our film on that attracts a younger audience of mainly females but partly males.

Magazine Cover Influences

Clare: with Empire magazine mainly looking at big blockbuster movies' such as Twilight and Harry Potter to do their whole issue on, they wouldn't display a picture of an independent movie as this wouldn't appeal to the audience. Films and the magazines, through marketing processes work closely together to ensure the right target audience is being targeted at to ensure the greatest profit. 

This front cover fits well with what you would expect to see on an empire film magazine. Daniel Radcliff, easily identified as Harry Potter is the main character and without having to read anything we know what film this will be about. I feel this image is particularly effective as well as he is still in character. It gives it a sense of depth and focus on the film. The only difference with this front cover to the other empire magazines is that the actors head is behind the Empire title. The master head being bright and bold, does stand out and easily creates a brand image for this magazine. There are also selling lines and cover lines which both give a little bit of information out on the left hand side of the magazine usually and catches the attention of others to get them to buy it. 

Clare: Unlike our film, Empire targets a much wider audience world wide which is resembled in how it looks mainly at big blockbusters. From the national readership survey site, you can determine that the main audience is from social groups AB and C1 and they are mostly 15-44 year old males. This shows how they style their films to fit their audience, as a lot of the time they depict action stars as well as sex icons like Megan Fox and Angelina Jolie, grabbing the attention of male viewers.

Clare: I created a mind map analysis of this particular Empire magazine cover using Photoshop and have described the positive aspects and elements of this particular theme magazine.

Blog Feedback

Amanda and Adeola: We are very pleased with our current feedback. However, we are aiming for an A grade. Therefore we need to make these certain improvements. In our evaluation we shall use more types of IT. For example, we will film ourselves answering a question, and use a Prezi. This way our blog won't be tedious and repetitive. We feel like we equally share our the written work and all contribute well. Our teamwork is sound and we communicate well with each other. Due to this, we know that our blog is detailed and thorough. However, we understand that we need to allow new and different ideas to emerge within our group to allow our blog to be more appealing and methodological. Overall, we are pleased with our feedback, we hope to continue to provide "detailed and in depth" research and effectively analyse each task.

Clare: We could also use programmes such as Powerpoint and Slideshare to demonstrate our work on, as this would communicate a broader use of ICT which is what we are lacking in, as we have currently only been doing basic blog posts. However, we have shown great detail in our blog and we will keep up with this to show a strong connection between our ideas and final outcomes.

Finished Film Poster

Amanda: This is our final finished film poster. We are very pleased with it. We particularly like the gradient effect we used, as it almost represents her life slowly getting darker and less happy, just like the sequence to our trailer. We kept the white font of 'brain flower' from dafont.com to keep a strict uniform. We showed it to several people in our year (male and female), and this was some of their responses: 

• "Wow, I love it! I would watch it!" - Emma Williams 
• "Oh, that girl looks so sad, bless her!" - Jess Chick
• "Poor girl, looks pretty good." - Filip Kamycki 

Ade: Despite our initial struggle with 'Photoshop' we completed our poster and we are pleased by the outcome of the finished and final thing. Aspects which enhance the poster are the title, the tagline, credits and main actual picture.

The main picture illustrated our creativity, and our skills using Photoshop. We did not merely take a plain picture and placed it onto the poster. Instead, we intelligently altered the image so that it represented and reflected something within the film without revealing too much of the story line. 

Our Credits were also professional, as we used a variation of font size and included important information about about our film and the people who participated in the making of the film.  To make our film poster modern and to promote our film we included websites  that our film is associated with. 

Our Tagline is also significant and we were pleased with its outcome. The tagline not only reflects the content of the film but similar to most film posters, is an appropriate font size. The background colour of our overall film poster is blue; this is good because it doesn't marginalise our target audience to only a female audience but cuts across to a range; of females and males. We were really pleased with the feedback that we received from some of the people that we asked. 

Clare: Overall, our poster demonstrates the initial genre type of our film 'Through My Eyes', and is able to depict to our target audience the types of elements that the film may consist of e.g. bullying. We didn't want to oversimplify the context of our poster because we wanted the main focus to be on the protagonist and nothing else, so the close head shot illustration is there to grab the viewers attention. Our finished poster includes all the appropriate elements of a film poster that we researched prior to our editing process e.g. the tagline, credits etc. This improves the professionalism of our final outcome and is therefore a success.

Clare: I also decided to enhance the lightness of the eyes as a final editing technique, using the dodge tool to brighten them. This made her eyes pop to draw in the attention of our target audience. 

Film Poster Completed Tagline

Ade: Of all our tagline ideas, we've decided, the one 'A Journey To Regain Her Past' is very suitable for film poster and reflects the content within the actual film. 
Similar to most tagline's that influenced our film poster, our tagline is short and simple. This allows it to grab the audience's attention before evoking curiosity within the minds of potential audience.
The tagline, although short and simple is complex in a way. This is because it reflects the content of the film and vaguely hints that there is a chain of events which result to Anna's search of Anna's happiness. 

Amanda: We particularly like  the fact the tagline doesn't hint the drama element in the film. We didn't want to reveal to the audience of Anna's drug taking and her mother's alcoholism through the poster. 
Our tagline is in the same font (brain flower) as our credits in the trailer and our poster title. This was because we wanted to be professional and keep a continuous link throughout our work. Below, you can see our tagline. We made sure it was relatively bigger than the credits to show its importance, however, it is smaller than our title so the viewer knows that it in an insight into what our film is about.

Film Poster Final Credits

Amanda and Ade: These are our final credits. We stuck with the idea of monochrome colours, like the other posters we looked at. The only use of colour is on our production company logos. We did this because we wanted the three of them to stand out and be noticed. We, like the 'Darkness' poster that we found on google images, as mentioned before, because of the release date in bold lettering and the sizing of the credits. Continuity is something we've upheld as we kept some of the names we used within our coursework (it appears in the poster and the trailer). We made our credits more professional and modern by including different websites and linking our film to social networking sites as we understand that its a a good way of appealing and promoting our films to a wider audience. 

We also used a variation of text sizes to make our credits look more realistic and used a clear font 'Arial' from photoshop. We initially used the 'charcoal' font but then realised that it wasn't as clear as the 'Arial' font. Most film poster credits, like the end screen credits in our trailer, use a bold and simple font like 'Arial' or 'Times New Roman'. This is strict and professional. We want our work to look as professional as possible.

Film Poster Completed Title

Ade: Below, is our finished and completed title, that we placed onto our poster ( at the top). To make our poster professional, we allowed the element of continuity to remain. This is why we used the same type of font from our film credits; the 'brainflower' font from 'dafont'. 
We initially used a black fill for our title, however, we soon realised that it wasn't visible as it blended into the character's hair. 
We went through the similar, process that we used to make our credits. We used 'photoshop' to alter the colour and size. 



Amanda: We like the idea of the white font also to show the purity of Anna, and her innocence. The black words on her face present the evil, dark nature of the people calling her those names, contrasting with her innocent personality.

Clare: The original title that we edited was quite blurry, so we had to make adjustments and use the 'fill tool' to thicken the font size, otherwise it looked unprofessional. However, this was quickly resolved and improved the general look of our poster.