Pofessional Magazine Analysis

The following is my analysis of a real magazine cover, Batman the Dark Knight - Empire Magazine:

For my magazine cover I decided to use and modify the ideas, general layout and theme of the well-known magazine “Empire”. Empire magazine is not a genre-based magazine as it evaluates and promotes all kinds of films ranging from “Lord of The Rings” which is an action film to “Hellboy” which slots into the horror genre. The magazine has some text but you do notice when analysing several of the magazines that none of them are flooded with text and more importantly don’t drown out or draw attention away from the eye-catcher, which is the main, dominant picture. The picture usually consists of one or a collection of the main characters dropped on a white background, or black when promoting a horror film. The title is generally an eye-catching red, the title needs to be clear to promote brand recognition in the future and so the name Empire stands out and is remembered enhancing the chances of another purchase. When analysing the magazine cover of Empire promoting the release of Batman “The Dark Knight” the predominant red title “Empire” was changed to a black filling with a lime green colour outlining the text. The black and green theme continued on the cover with this being the colour of the text advertising what’s inside the magazine and textual references to interviews and movie reviews. On this magazine cover we can also see the classical conventions of any magazine with a small barcode in the corner (usually the bottom corner) and the date, price and issue number all included on the cover, however with these 3 features I am surprised to see them in an unconventional position in-between the “M” of Empire. This in my opinion gives the poster a rushed look in that there was no other place to put it so it was just randomly placed in a fairly scruffy position. One convention of most magazines I want to avoid is the cramming in of textual references. I want my text to be clear, in small amounts and not in odd positions making the magazine look scruffy and rushed. However there is a real key convention that I am keen to follow and this is the picture of the main character dominating the magazine. I feel this picture is the principal attraction of a magazine cover. In this picture we see the main character in “The Joker” who is glaring at the camera with darkened face paint and eyes. The real advantage to this picture is that the dark sense immediately tells us the film is a gothic film so the target audience who I am aiming the film at should be buying the magazine and seeing how Empire reviews/rates it. The dark nature of the Batman imagery suggests evil or badness, but Batman fans know that the stories deal with a sort of comic book evil rather than a seriously threatening one. We are not frightened by The Joker because they are comic figures, in comic make up and comic costumes. Similarly the shadowy cityscape of Gotham City is not the same as the shadowy darkness in Saw or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Student Magazine Analysis

Below is an example of a student's magazine, a part of the ancillary task required for the Media A2 coursework collaboration. Below the image is the link to Nemi's blog where I obtained the example through www.getaheadocrmedia.blogspot.com

http://nemi-nem.blogspot.com/

The Example above is useful to me because by identifying the main strenghts and weaknesses of the magazine I can use these pro's and con's to see where perhaps I could improve and what I need to avoid doing when processing my own magazine.

The main strenghts of the poster include that the student has clearly researched magazines and has used some of the codes and convention in making her magaizne. For example through researching magazines such as Empire and TOTALFILM she has identified that they all include a date, price and barcode and she has used all 3 in the processing of her own magazine. I plan to follow these conventions as she did to improve my magazine cover.

Another strenght of the magazine is that the student has seen the impact the title has on magazine and noted their importance and has decided to really emphasise the importance in her own magazine by making the title a very large font and using a bright red font to generate a more significant impact than perhaps a small white title would.

A real negative of the magazine however is the bluriness and clear pixilation of her main image. Round the edges of the picture the editing is obviously very rough and rushed. I want to avoid this at all costs as I feel that poor editing can lead to a magazine looking un-professional or fairly scruffy.

Another negative of the magazine is the text around the image. I feel the text looks very plain and very unappealing. The text should attract you towards the magazine not put you off, which is why I have decided not to use any text around the outside of my magazine just a selling line to promote the film. I want the audience to be attracted to the picture and the selling line, I do not feel that including several chunks of text around the otuskirts of the pciture will appeal to my target audience.

In conclusion I would want my magazine to look more like the example of Empire magazine below than this cover. It may just be a difference in preference but I feel that the lesser amount of text there is the more appealing the magazine is. The magazine example below includes a very limited amount of text and focuses heavily on the image of "Legolas" and the punch line "Let the battle begin" while still following conventions such as price, date and a compulsory barcode.

Magazine U-turn

In reviewing my magazine with some media collegues I decided to abort my plans to create a multi genre magazine and went on to make a horror-specific magazine. Below are the installments to my magazine and how its different to my old multi-genre magazine.

Above was the first installment to my magazine cover, this was the picture taken and used for my background and main image of my magazine. The pciture is very scary in my opinion espcially with the eyeballs in an odd position. I discuss this picture in further detail in a seperate post on the pictures alone.

The second development of my magazine cover was the addition of the title. I changed this from "Exclusive" which feedback showed me that the title was "boring" and didn't really lure the audience in. My new title is "Exhibit" which I used and feedback proved to be much more positive than with Exclusive. To make the title stand out more I used the "Wind" effect on Photoshop to enhance the title and emphasise on that, as this is a key factor in the magazine, one of the most important, alongside the main picture.

The third stage to my magazine development although small are extremely improtant and neccesary ot any magazine. The additions to my magazine above were the date/price/issue number and a small "what's inside" shape giving out some information about what's inside the magazine.
The significance of these is important as the price is a key contributor to whether the magazine is bought or not. The price cannot be too high and has to be at an adequate rate dependent on what the consumer gets out of it, e.g. exclusive interviews, inside contents and number of pages is important to the price. The issue number and date is less important but still has to be there to allow the consumer to be aware of their possible purchase.

The final installment is the text or the catch line shown above. This is the same as in the previous magazine with the exception of a change in the style of the text. The previous style was quite hard to read and caused some strain however the new style and font is easy to read and is of the same standard as the other style.

You may notice that I have used my actor George in my poster and my female actress Ellie in my magazine and this is because I wanted to add variety to the anciallry tasks and I wanted them to stand out from each other. So I decided to have my actress on my Magazine and my actor on the poster, one critic who gave me some feedback said this may cause some confusion but most said it was fine and liked that there was some variety and distinction betweem the two media products.

Magazine Preperations

I had the design and template of my magazine in order however the most influencial part of any magazine cover was missing, the dominant picture promoting a film. In my case it was a multi-brand magazine promoting a horror-based film in Ready Or Not.
So I thought what did I want on the front cover of my magazine after anaylsing both a student magazine and a professional magazine in Batman The Dark Knight.
I decided the picture had to be luring and instead of the male character being on the cover like in the poster, I wanted to have the female character on the front cover of the magazine. I felt this added diverse and variety to my ancillary tasks rather than just using the same image or near enough the same image on both poster and magazine covers.
So to set up the shot I wanted to create I had to prepare my female character and attempt to get her to look the same as she did in the film, which proved to be quite difficult with the makeup. Below are some of the shots I took of my female character preparing to shoot for the magazine cover.

After all the makeup was put on and the costumes were too I decided to use to seperate locations to shoot. One was in a room where a plain white wall could be used as an equivilent as a backdrop and was conveniently located by a window so by using curtains I was able to ajdust the lighting.
Below was location 1 of the photoshooting

Location 2 was used also in the filming process unlike with location 1. Location 1 is the basement or cellar area which is really suited to a scary movie location, as its a rundown, rusty old area. The Cellar/Basements problem was that it may not be ideal as a backdrop suitable for use in a magazine, this meant that my immeadiate preferal was pictures taken from location 1. Location 2 (The Basement/Cellar) is shown below).

After taking the pictures I needed to decide which ones were good and which ones needed to be discarded and then make a final decision on the pciture I wanted to be on my magazine cover.

Below are some of the shots that I decided against:

The image below for bluriness.

And this one for not focusing enough on the actress and too much on the camera in the shot.

In the end I decided on of the two images below for my magazine beacuse the shots both brings a sense of power and I feel that my character here really captures the mood I was trying to create, a tensious, powerful mood.

Magazine Developments

Below is the progress made on my Film design for my magazine front cover. In designing it I attempted to follow similar conventions to multi-genre magazines such as Empire and Total film after research gave me little inspiration to do a horror based magazine.

The first image is of my inital design- i.e. step 1

Step 1 of my magazine front cover development involved devising a suitable title for my multi-genre magazine. I didn't do much research into this because I didn't want inspiration, I wanted to think of a suitable title myself and I shortlisted a few names like "Movie Fever" and "Cine Review" but in the end I came up with the name Exclusive which I really liked as did the rest of my media group. What I added to the "Exclusive" was a text style which is shown below. I felt the style add character to the magazine and looked far better than the titles used in Empire and Total Film where they are one colour generally in red black or white.

Below is phase 2 of my Film Magazine front cover

The second phase of my development included adding text to the top of the magazine above the title, this in the multi-genre magazines was used as special feature bit where either a free item would be offered with the purhcase of the magazine or perhaps a special feature inside. I followed these conventions here in letting the audience know that there is a special feature inside where 3 big name stars give their input on the top 40 films of all time. This kind of bonus feature will help enhance sales of the magazine.



Student Film Teaser Trailer Analysis

Below is a teaser trailer made my a student (Nemi) see Nemi's Media Blog. The trailer is called  "The Last Journey". In this blog I will be giving an analysis like I did with the poster and magazine on the advantages and disadvantages of the teaser trailer.

 

Firstly, the advantages and the first is that some good shots are used within this trailer, for example on the 34 second mark there is a high angle shot of a girl on the phone. This shot portrays the inferiority of the girl, perhaps emphasising how she may be in some sort of danger.

The second advantage of the teaser trailer is that it doesn't give too much detail and content from the film away. I've seen several student trailers and a lot seem to give away much of the content from the film and therefore spoils it. The consumer wants to be attracted but not to know too much of the storyline and this is essential and that is what this teaser trailer does well.

However, the teaser trailer carries many disadvantages too. One being that the music is very patchy in that at one point a Britney Spears song is playing then all of a sudden cuts to an instrumental. The editing to the soundtrack is quite poorly done and is doesn't have a flow to it like it should do.

Another disadvantage is acting, the acting is not entirely convincing with the fight being fairly poorly created with one slap to the back and then them departing from each other and the girl also seemed to be smirking a little when attepting to cry. However credit does have to be given in that they are not professional actresses.

By identifying such advantages and disadvantages I can see for my teaser trailer what needs to be added or improved and what needs to be avoid in the production of my filiming.