Research on Magazine Ideas

Now we have finished our main trailer and poster we are now beginning to create a magazine cover. To help us with ideas of what type of magazine cover to replicate I have posted below different magazine covers from 5 magazine companies which are; Empire, Total film, Sight and Sound, Little White Lies and Studio. I have also briefly discussed each one suggesting why or why not this particular design or magazine layout would be good for our particular genre.


Empire 

Empires magazine layout is a possibility considering it is the worlds No.1 film magazine. This would allow our film to get as much distribution possible and allow many people to know about our trailer. Our idea at the beginning of making the trailer for our target audience was to try and make it as mainstream as possible by having it appeal to both male and female audiences. We also liked the way that some issues used main characters from the films they are advertising such as this one of 'Bane' and some covers featured part of the set as well. This would give us some choice into the type of angle we would like to present our trailer as. The overall composition of the magazine is very busy with lots of different sized text, this could be quite tricky to replicate for a horror film unless we created it as a Halloween special. We also liked how the image overlaps the title slightly showing that the magazine must be very well known, otherwise  some people may just think its called 'EMRE' or 'EMPE' this is something we would need to be careful of if we decided to replicate this style in our own way.


Total Film

Similar to that of Empire, Total Film again is very busy in terms of composition. The genre of our trailer being a supernatural thriller we think wouldn't fit with the colourful orange handwriting, as we feel it would ruin the effect of our trailer which is to make people think its creepy and scary and want to see it for that very reason. Again as I stated with the Empire magazine the images cover part of the title, something we need to think about and can only really do if replicating an Empire or Total film magazine. So far our preference would have to be Empire, it is less cluttered and busy even though Empire magazine is quite busy, and would give us the best chance of advertising our film to a mass audience.









Sight & Sound

In our opinion we found that this magazine would not be suitable for our genre of film. This is simply to do with the fact that this certain design has a much classier feel to it and tends to feature a portrait of either the main actor of the film or the director. In our film the mask is the most symbolic thing about it, if we were to use this on a magazine like 'Sight & Sound' it may look out of place. This is because this particular magazine isn't meant to scare the audience. We also get the feeling that this magazine may be aimed at an older audience as it generally tends to feature older actors, the film 'Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy' featured on the cover of the left was also a film favoured by older people which supports this idea.










Little White Lies

At first we were not to keen on the presentation of the title used for the 'Little White Lies' magazine. However as I stated before the mask in our film is very symbolic and that is the only thing we could really use to show what our film is about. We both agree that this magazine covers composition being so simple that you only need one image and no text apart from the slight subtle text of the title printed in some artistic way is quite interesting. The overall magazine covers are quite arty and almost cartoon like. The reason we choose to present the cover for 'The Skin I live in' is is because it has a similar masked image to the one used in our film, and gives off a slightly creepy feel which is what we want our magazine to give off. This is our favourite design at the moment as it is so simple yet quite startling, which is what we are looking for.





Studio

This magazine cover is completely not suitable for our genre and style of film. The classy almost vogue like style would never in think of presenting a supernatural thriller as it's front page cover. This is very much like the magazine 'Sight & Sound' in the fact that it gives off the impression it is meant for a certain genre or audience, in this case women. The types of film you may find on the cover of this magazine would be romances, dramas and old fashioned movies that have been re-made.













To conclude from our research we are currently deciding between either Empire but maybe a simplistic version like the one below or Little White Lies.  We will post our final choice and magazine designs in a later post.