Finished film magazine cover thing

For the second part of the task, we were required to create the front cover for a magazine featuring our film. Since I'd spent so much time on the film poster, I decided to simply use a variant on the music magazine that I'd created last year. If anything this meant that a) a great deal of research and design was skipped, as I'd already done all the work, and b) my A2 work linked back to my AS work, meaning that the two portfolios, instead of being completely separate, were now linked through one piece of work.

Anyway, here's the magazine cover;

As you can see by heading over to my AS level blog ( http://www.evlbzltyr.blogspot.co.uk/2011/04/basically-finished.html )  the magazine cover shares a variety of similarities with the original music magazine. The general aesthetics are very similar, the fonts, the colours, and the style are all essentially the same. Even the titles are relatively similar - whereas the music magazine was called "Amplifier", I decided to call the film-centric edition "Amplifilm". This magazine, although from the same publishing company, was centred on films rather than music. It also meant that I was able to choose a relatively original sounding name for my magazine, something that couldn't have been done if I'd tried to come up with a new style.

The only real changes to the aesthetic style are to do with the film it's supposed to be featuring within its imaginary pages. The photo I chose to use for the front cover was originally going to be in the centre, but a combination of the text being hard to read when over the character's suit and the character looking to the left of the magazine meant that it looked better to move the photo over to the right. The text was a little hard to read at the bottom, so I used a "drop shadow" effect to add some 3d elements to the text and make it easier to read, essentially giving it a dark outline. There's a little bit of blank space at the top, but that can't be avoided. I tried making the gradient in the background darker to make it seem like there was more to the cover than there really was, but this didn't do much.

The text at the very bottom of the cover (the "playing with fire" text) I decided to type in the same font style as that of the film poster, to link the two pieces together and imply that the font used (Rockwell bold, or something like that. Don't worry Future Tim, I've got your back) was the one that the film was going to use throughout the entire marketing campaign, probably in the opening or closing credits for the film itself, and possibly eventually on the DVD case after it came out on DVD. The reason for the change in the colour scheme, however, was simple - wheras on the poster, the text for the film title was yellow, to match the warm reds and other colours on the poster, as well as fitting in with the Pulp Fiction conventions, the text on the magazine cover had to fit in with the rest of the aesthetics, and making the text yellow would have simply ruined the aesthetic look of the magazine.

While not as technically advanced as some of my peers, I was hoping to go for a more aesthetically pleasing design, rather than a technically brilliant yet ugly mess, which I knew would be the outcome if I tried some of the more advanced editing techniques I had previously planned. In order to keep the simplistic look and ensure that the text wasn't too hard to read or see against a cluttered background, I had to sacrifice a perhaps more technically advanced look and instead focus on making sure the basics were there and looked good, resultng in a simple, yet striking and original look.

If I had more time, I probably would've gone and done some further research on film magazines, but the fact is that I was running out of time and had to make some sacrifices in order to meet the deadline. At least it looks remarkably different to the film poster, giving two completely different designs based around the same subject.