By Jake Thorne

When analysing front cover, so I can get ideas for my front cover, I found that the mast heads & titles of all the magazines that I analysed were all really bold & stood out. This is to attract the read and make them aware of who makes this magazine & to show that they are a big company so people should trust their opinions & ideas. So when it came to designing my own masthead/ title I decided that I had to do the same – make it bold & eye catching, as well as not being too long. I looked mainly at Empire magazine, but when it came to my actual title I thought that it should contain the word FILM in it as this shows that he magazine is going to be about Films to the reader. After searching I found the magazine total film with the total writing in the top half of the F and thought that this was a clever little combination, so I found a word related to film – Reel as in film reel, so decided to do the same as total film & put the reel in the top part of the F. I think this works really well as it has several connotation as it relates to film reel as well as REAL which implies that the magazine is all about film & gives good opinions & reviews.

When researching film magazines, I have found that a convention of the film magazine genre is that they have a main article about an up and coming film or a new release, which on the front cover has the main character of this film & the main character is often the only image on the front cover apart from teasers, and the nearly always are overlapped by the masthead/title. So for my magazine front cover, I decided that I must have one big main image, that attracts the reader & stands out from the background, but without clashing.

When researching the lighting for the process of taking still images for my magazine front cover I found that the lighting must be bright enough to bring out all the skin definition, but not too bright to blur the image or to ‘shine’ out the model. When shoot I took several trial photos to make sure I got this level correct & the way I wanted it, to bring out facial feature & muscle definition properly.

Jake Thorne

Josh Bampton

Paul Burt

Tim Farr

Matt Borg

Flynn Connoly

Still shot camera

Woods Browning Photos shoot area (Bodmin College)

Lighting

Black screen

Apple Mac computer

Apple Mac laptop

Photoshop