Evaluation of the Magazine Front Cover

Evaluation of the Magazine Front Cover

Through the magazine cover the representation of good and evil is portrayed through the lighting in the pictures of each character, which was edited through the programme CS4 Photoshop. We decided to change the lighting of the pictures to help show the semantic meaning through to our audience whom we hoped would pick up on what we had done when looking at the cover. By showing Bobby Watts as the brightest lit it shows across how he is the hero within the film as heroes are normally seen in a good light. Chace is in normal lighting to show how he is an average, ordinary guy however by placing Gabriel’s character in dark lighting behind Chace it portrays the power Gabriel has over Chace and also portrays the fact that within the film Chace’s character is haunted and meddled with Gabriel’s character. On the right of Chace we have placed The Evil Doctor whom is in a darkened light to show how he isn’t the stereotypical helpful doctor but instead is one of the other evil characters that Chace comes across within the film. One of the negative points about the pictures is how you can clearly see the straight edges in places of the pictures where they have been cut around which makes it look slightly un-finished and scruffy so by blending the edges and smoothing them out I think they could look more professional. If we were to re-do the photos I think we would consider re-shooting them to improve the lighting of each one to make it clearer to the audience the difference in lighting for each photo, especially the doctor as he doesn’t perhaps look as evil as he could do however overall I think we did a good job of capturing each character’s personalities through the photos and positioning on the page.

The representation through the use of an extreme close-up shot of a pocket watch for the background of the magazine cover is to show how time is ticking until Gabriel does another thing bad for example kill someone else. We found it very symbolic by using an extreme close-up shot of the watch after testing various distance close-ups of the pocket watch as it shows every small detail of the watch which relates to how every second counts that is ticking down till the next killing that Gabriel’s character performs and by using feedback from our target audience that also helped to influence our choice on the better front cover background.

The reasoning behind the striped lines above and underneath the title ‘Directors Cut’ is to symbolise a Directors cut board which we found would clearly imply how the magazine’s genre is based on films and how it also contrasts well with the magazine name that we have used. Unfortunately because of the picture in the background the title of our film is not clearly seen in the black font however we did not find this too much of a problem so left it as it is as we were happy enough. If we were to change it though, we would either change the background picture so that the lighting of it doesn’t affect the title of the magazine or we would change the font colour to an appropriate one that can be seen.

We positioned the title of our film in front of the main character as we found many other film magazines e.g. (Empire) tended to place the film they were advertising’s name in the centre of the page so the reader can easily identify the film’s name. We ensured that we used our tagline underneath the placing of our film’s name so that it can indicate the genre of the film clearly and by using a distorted red font for both the film name and the tagline we wanted it to symbolise the blood of the people killed in our film and the distorted font was to show how the character is messed up due to the multi-personality of the main character. One problem the title of the film on the front cover is that it is too small and would have to be made bigger if improved as it could do with being more empowering on the page to emphasise the name more.

We abbreviated the title of one of the film names we made up to portray that the reader would be knowledgeable to recognise what film is being abbreviated without looking at the picture next to it. It also would show how the reader would loyally know the film well and that’s why the reader would want a poster of that film and ‘Pint of Milk’ as they are representing well known films, which is what present film magazines (Empire and Total Film) do to make their audiences want to read and buy their magazines.

We chose a contrasting colour scheme as it is a common feature for magazines to do to interest readers. Although the burgundy is slightly dull it works with the black, white and red, especially complimenting the reds vibrant personality bringing a more subtle and calmer tone to the magazine itself. The only problem with some of the colour choices is that in areas some letters are out of view as the image behind disfigures the letter. If we re-made the magazine we would consider changing the colour scheme to prevent this from happening.

Overall the magazine cover was a success despite the few things we could do with changing to improve it. We found it fairly good going to construct and included as much information about our film through the layout of the magazine.

Jo :)