Forms and conventions of a magazine front cover and how we as a group will use them

As we started on the second part of our project, our group started to look at and research different magazine front covers from one major production magazine companies like Empire, Total Film etc and one from a less nationally publicised magazine like Little White Lies, Sight and Sound etc. we chose to look at Empire and Little White Lies and started to analyse two magazine they produced to give us an example for our own project to follow.

Forms and conventions:
• Masthead, strap lines, reversed out cover lines, issue date and number, splashes, freebies, a main sell, a barcode and price.
• Eye catching title, (and depending on the genre) bright, colorful, bold, stands out from the background
• Persuasive language – through reviews or taglines etc to make people want to see the movie
• Promotional features like actors’ name, director, reviews etc
• Possibly use the rule of thirds as a format
• Usually one predominant image
• Important to correctly represent the genre of the movie to attract the right audience
• A quotation from the film or about the film from newspapers or critics who’ve reviewed it
How will we use these?
We as a group plan to:
• We plan to call our magazine “Screen”
• We plan to make our background colour blue as it as is a strong colour and have our title colour as black as most magazine usually have a darker background and brighter title, but we wanted to challenge these conventions
• Include a quotation as an overview of the film/ trailer
• Include other reviews included inside/ within the magazine
• We want our image to also be threatening and intimidating yet relaxed and different from the image we want to use for our film poster