Evaluation: Magazine Editing

This is the very very first draft of the magazine and this was the starting point for it. I just started experimenting with backgrounds and text  and the layout of the different titles, i was trying to replicate the layout of a total film magazine , which was our inspiration as it was a big film gossip magazine. But we noticed that there were few horror covers for this magazine but we thought this would challenge the normal conventions of  this type of film magazine by putting a pure horror film as the front cover. As on other covers there have been dark covers for more action films rather than horror. We thought it would be approriate to base the magazine on this because this it was a low classification horror film and would still make the magazine appeal to a wide audience.

The film magazines logo was made using adobe fireworks which works better for editing text. And then i imported this file into the photoshop file.
i  used the autoshapes to create the sticker and the background to the text as this is what was on other magazine covers.

Here i edited the backgrounds to find something that would be suitable for a horror magazine. But this was before we had a picture so i decided to fill in the background with something. This was  done by finding a blank background off the internet and inserting it into the photoshop and then making sure the layer is at the back by putting it at the top of the layer list at the side of the screen.

This is the initial image that we got and started to edit in order to place on the front of the magazine, at this point we werent entirely sure what type of image we wanted to have on the cover of the magazine. We had researched the types of image that are put on the front of a magazine, although we did not come across many horror based covers we found that many had as strong character image as the staple image, and we knew that this was what we wanted to create with ours. We firstly tried to adjust the lighting and the exposure of the image to give it a darker edge that it needed to make it appear more like it fitted into the horror genre. As the original photo was shot in the day and we managed to dim down the background using the exposure tools which can be found in the drop down menu at the bottom right which come up with a variety of editing options.

this was the first draft of the magazine. As you can see the image isn't very strong we tried to edit it as much as we could so that it would suit the genre but on here you can only see the hand clearly and we wanted to have a strong image of the main actors face for reasons such as we wanted to clearly portray that the film is about a child, but you can't tell that much about the film from this image i don't think. which is why we were advised to go and get another picture. We added the various layers of text using the text tool. But i think the text looks a bit inconsistent throughout the front cover, this could have been a good thing as some of the text would stand out more but i wanted to keep it simple and alike to what the text is like on a actual magazine where there are headings which are all in the same font and smaller text underneath the headings is all of the same font also as i think looks more professional. This the reason we decided to develop this design. The layout we had i think looked similar to other magazines with the text down the left hand side of the page. I had also seen magazines that had the main actors name in bold letters at the bottom of the page. But from audience feedback that i did on this piece of work the failed to see who Josh sanga was because of the unclear image and also they couldnt tell that the title deranged linked to the actors name, this is a reason that we decided to move onto a second draft so that we could edit these problems.

by starting again the first thing we did was not having a background this time because we knew we were going to insert an image We prettey much kept the main agazine title the same and added in the web address so that it looks more modern and quite often magazines have this advertised on the front of the magazines. We then made the headings red so that these were all the same and it looked more consistant this also helped the magazine link to the other products -the trailer and the poster as the colour themes run throughout the products,black,white,red as these are the common conventions that are stereotypical of a horror film. The black to connote the darkness and which contrasts with the white showing that there is always an innocent charater opposing a evil character. Then the red symbolises the blood and gore as well as danger which is agiven in most horror films. Then we had the text under the headings which is also in the same font giving it that extra consistency compared with the last draft where all the text was different colours and sizes. Also there is more space between text which i think looks better. Then instead of having the actors name we actually had the title of the film because we thought this would be more obvious to the reader. We also put the tagline in so that the ancillary products link with the trailer.

Here is the final draft with image added in, this is a stronger image as the the boy looks eerie and you can tell he is a child and there is something about him that loks mysterious because his stance. It is a lot darker looking more horror and you can see his full face. The image didnt need a lot of editing the expoure and the lighting were adjusted.