Tuesday 10 January 2012

Film magazine cover research

I had difficulty trying to find film magazines with front covers mainly about romantic comedies. Magazines I would usually research such as Total Film and Empire mainly covered action films.



Magazines which cover different forms of media such as Entertainment Weekly sometimes use romantic comedy-based front covers so when I design my magazine cover it is likely that I will have to design a film magazine with a mixture of the two conventions. Designing my own film magazine is difficult because as well as putting more thought into the magazine such as coming up with a name, slogans and price details, I have to consider the design so it still follows the conventions of film magazines.


Entertainment Weekly usually has neutral backgrounds; just  a basic color scheme with no patterns or background images. This is completely different to film magazines such as Total Film and Empire because they usually have patterned backgrounds or background images. Total Film and Empire also tend to only use one person on the front cover whereas Entertainment Weekly sometimes use 2 people. 
Entertainment Weekly uses very few effects when it comes to text. There are drop shadows but there are no dramatic effects (like metallic colors) used on the text like Empire and Total Film. Entertainment weekly uses sans serif text and Total Film and Empire usually use serif text. The position of the model on the cover also varies- on the cover of Empire and Total Film magazines the model is usually taken in a long shot whereas on the cover of Entertainment Weekly the photos are usually close-ups or medium close-ups. There is a lot more text on the covers of the two film magazines whereas on the cover of Entertainment Weekly there are usually just one or two bits of text. However, the text on the cover of Entertainment Weekly is larger to take up more space on the cover unlike Total Film and Empire who don't need to do this due to the amount of text they include on their front covers. The film magazines main focus is on the films whereas Entertainment Weekly's focus is mainly on the actors and the gossip on the set of films and other media. 

| am going to make my film magazine similar to Total Film and Entertainment Weekly by using conventions from both magazines. I am mainly going to use conventions from Total Film as this magazine is specifically for films but the language, background and the photos used will be more similar to Entertainment Weekly. The conventions from Total Film I will feature will be things like more text, more text effects and the photos I use will be long shots. My magazine will also focus on more films than Entertainment Weekly does.