Film Magazine Cover...

For the second of our ancillary tasks, we needed to create the front cover of a film magazine which would promote the release of the film in our teaser trailer. We had an idea relatively early on over what the picture on the cover would show. We wanted to the cover to be primarily black and white, with bits of red which we hoped would stand out well on the otherwise colourless picture. What we wanted to create for the cover was picture of the girl in the film, with a completely blank face, and her eyes closed, with crosses over her eyes, symbolising that she is dead. To further imply that the girl is dead, we wanted for there to be a small trail of blood running down her face, starting at her eye. Rather than creating our own fictional film magazine, we chose to create the cover to look like an edition of the well known magazine, Total Film. This was mainly because we thought that nothing we could come up with would like as professional and authentic as using an already existing magazine brand. We started off by just taking the picture, and then with the help of photoshop, we created the effect of having the entire picture black and white, with the exception of the trail of blood which stayed red. Then we placed over the picture the logo of Total Film magazine. We decided against having lots of writing involving the film on the cover, and instead just having the title of the film, along with a line underneath to give people something to urge them to buy the magazine. This was something that seemed to be common on film magazine covers, being used on the covers promoting Star Trek, and Terminator Salvation. We put the title of the film in red font, to coincide with the red blood on the black and white face. The other use of red on the cover was on the 'I' of the title of the magazine, as we found when looking at existing covers of magazines, like the one promoting Inception, the title of the magazine was altered slightly, to relate to the film which the cover was promoting. We chose to play on this, by including a single red letter, to carry on the trend of a mainly black and white cover, with bits of red to both make the cover stand out, and to give the audience a hint to the type of film PRESUMED DEAD would be, as the colour red almost always gives the impression of blood.
These pictures show the progress of our magazine cover, from the original picture, to the final product.