Working On My Magazine Cover!!

Here I will be documenting my progress towards completing my magazine cover. It was a long process and equally challenging, if not more so, than the poster beacsue of trying to balance the use of all the different texts with the images.

To begin making my cover, the first thing I did was search for the perfect font to display the title of the magazine - 'Starlet'. I decided upon 'Nouvelle Vague' and presented it large and pink to begin with. To make it look more eye-catching I experimented with making the lettering sparkle by juxtaposing glitter tinted pink on top of the title. I settled on the image below.

I added the tagline to make the title look more official and professional. I hoped the tagline would really define and give an overview of what the magazine was all about.

I used a photograph of teen actress Keke Palmer to frame the aspects of the cover around as I did not yet have a photograph of Funmi. I replaced the photo once we had done our second photoshoot. U sing this image intially was really helpful, as trying to place all the apsects with no idea of where the photo of Funmi would eventually go was incredibly difficult. The second thing I did was make sure all of the essential information was on the cover before I got carried away adding all the articles and features. As such, I added the barcode, website address and price tags.


Following that I added the main featuring article of the issue, 'Spinning Time.' In an attempt to make the magazine more interesting to the target audience I displayed some of the things that Funmi addresses in her interview that normally attract females; Such as what happens behind the scenes, and about the interests and feelings of the actress herself in and out of character. This isn't an element excercised much on actual film magazine covers, but it's very much a feature of girly magazines so adding it in I think creates a division of movie magazine that is specifically aimed at females as it has features of the magazines that they usually read such as 'Glamour' or 'Seventeen.'

Looking at film Magazines - I recognised a lot of them offer exclusives into upcoming films. With this in mind I thought of some new films in the genre and worked them into catchy sentences including the main stars name in the style of article headlines. 'Xtina Aguilera goes Burlesque = an interview with Christina Aguilera about her recently released theatrical debut in 'Burlesque .'

I tried to use fillms tyhat were all quite different from each other and from the main film 'Spinning Time' so the magazine could appeal to loads of different types of girls. 'Easy A' is for a more mature audience due to it's sexual content and humour. It makes a sattire of several other media texts via intertexuality like Gossip Girl and the Sisterhood of Travelling Pants and so can really only be fully aprecciated by the older range of girls in the target audience.Whereas Burlesque is an all singing all dancing affair - so althoguh raunchy - could attract girls and women alike. Finally at the very other end of the spectrum 'The Roomate' is a horror/thriller film however it should still appeal to a large demographic of girls due to the casting of the protagonist being the very popular Leighton Meester.

I made this sticker for the magazine in Microsoft Word.

To work even more film titles into the magazine I tried to come up with a theme rather than just displaying them randomly on the page. I came up with '2011 Romance Heaven' which would be apart of the edition focusing on romance films and romantic comedies being released in 2011 such as those stated which can be seen in the screen cap below.

I noticed a feature of most Empire cover's was a 'PLUS' feature followed by other films that were also in the magazine as well as the main article. Here I chose films that are highly anticipated, especially amongst females e.g. 'Breaking Dawn'. 'Disney's Prom' is a bit less known, but with Disney as its creators and distributors, closer to the time of it's release it will probably be all other the place and do quite well at the box office. 'Again, to diffrentiate the films to appeal to a diverse audience of females I also featured the film 'The Help'. It is a film I expect would hopefully attract the older bracket of the target audience. It is based on a best selling book of the summer of the same name by Kathryn Stockett, telling a story which is empowers women of all races and backgrounds. I'm highly anticipatign this film and so I hope the subject matter of the film should add another dimension to the quality and content of the magazine.

Many of the magazine for females I looked at offer free gifts. As this was the first edition of the magazine I thought it would make good business sense to offer some kind of promotion with the edition, to encourage people to buy. To tie in with it being a film magazine, I thought offering one free entry to see a film at any odeon cinema would be great for magazine sales and would get even more people into Odeon cinemas. So it would be advantageous for everyone!!!

Some editions of Empire also offer promotional posters of the film so I decided to do that too. Encouraging even more people to buy. People are generally more attracted to buy things when they feel like they're getting something extra or free. The posters and free entry to the cinema tick both pf those boxes! I gave away the actual poster I made for the film, and whipped up another promotional poster featuring Funmi in front of a huge clock.

This is the final product. I am quite happy with it but there are some things that I would change if I could, I will look at these in further detail in my evaluation.