Magazine Front Cover Progress

Below are screenshots to show how my movie magazine front cover has progressed during the creation stage. I have print screened my progress on Photoshop at different stages in order to show the variations between my start and end products.

As you can see from this print screen, this is when I first started creating it. The first thing I done was decide on a colour scheme of black, white and red - as in my poster, in order to show a level of continuity. I had then inserted typical magazine cover conventions such as a barcode and sub-stories so I had something to go off. 

This screen shot shows my cover starting to come along nicely. I had inserted my main image and edited it using the eraser tool to blur out the edges and blend it into the black background. My masthead had also started to be designed and I used the title 'Empire' as this is arguably the most known movie magazine company in the world. 

By now, you can see that I had changed a number of things. I changed the title from Empire to Action as I wanted to be original and make my own brand - as I have tried to do with my film overall. I didn't want to take someone elses' fame and decided it was best to create my own movie magazine company. I had also inserted other conventions from magazine front covers such as a website, price, issue number, date and motto in order to make it look realistic. I had also changed the typography colour from red to orange/yellow in order to go appropriately with my main image as if the match is their light source. I watched a YouTube tutorial on how to add a fire effect to text as again, I wanted my main image to relate to the cover. I wanted my masthead to look like it had been set on fire by the match in the image and the tutorial involved rasterising and blending the text to get the best possible outcome. 

Here, I have added a title for the main story which is simply the film title as well as a rhetorical question in an attempt to entice people to buy the magazine and find out more if they are intrigued. I decided not to have my title font the same as what I had in my trailer and on my poster as I wanted it to match the masthead typography.

Here is the final image of my magazine front cover. I decided to get rid of the flames on the masthead as they were too overpowering and took the attention away from the main image and stories. I also reverted back to using red text for the sub stories as there was too much orange otherwise. Now I feel it has the right balance of lighting, especially seen as I adjusted the main image and made it slightly darker to give it even more of an eerie feel.