Creating my magazine front cover

When I was thinking about what pictures to take for my magazine front cover, I had in mind the other magazine front cover's I had looked at and their layout and how that looks appealing to an audience. I looked up 'scared girl horror' images on google and found inspiration for facial expressions and position of the model for my images.


These photos can me and idea of what I wanted on the front of my magazine cover because I wanted to have one of the girls from our trailer on the front page as I had the mask (main character) on my poster and I wanted to them to link through characters and make the film known for its horror rather than just the main killer (the masked man).


I took a series of images which I then had to choose the most suitable picture for my front cover - I chose this picture because it showed the best feared expression and also I captured her just at the right time when she turned her head around with her hair blowing as if she was in motion (running, dodging the trees, etc).

I decided to use Adobe Photoshop for the editing of my magazine front cover as I am more comfortable with this software and do not want to waste my time learning how to use Adobe InDesign where I can perform more on a software I have good knowledge about. The first step of creating my magazine front cover was to plan a layout which I constructed on the computer so I can use it next to the picture when I am editing by splitting the screen.  This helped me as I was able to save time by editing my front cover straight away to this layout.

I added the Magazine title and editing the colour slightly to have a horizontal gradient from red to black which looks a bit more scary than the ordinary block red text which is the usual Empire title. I added this to the picture of Ellie (my model) and cut out the parts which go in front of her head to look as if she is 3D on the magazine - I also did this when I inserted the '25 years of Empire' badge to look recent as the magazines I looked at had this on and it looks professional and more realistic. Although, I did not plan to have text above my magazine title, I looked at the other magazine front covers and a few had this featured - I thought it made the magazine look more important which is why I inserted it in a bold text.

I decided on the layout of my cover lines previously when I was looking at other magazine front covers for inspiration and came up with a block of cover lines in all the same colour but different fonts and different sizes. I wanted each font to represent the genre of film I used - e.g. Fury is about a war full of action and drama which is why I used a condensed bold mode, where as the film Fifty shades of Grey I mentioned as 'Mr Grey will see you now' (the famous line from the film) is a romantic film which is why I made this thin writing - looking feminine. Also, I created the 'Furious 7' cover line to be the same as what the logo for the film really looks like showing the relation to the real films rather than making them up.

I then carried on to add a plug sign advertising an interview with a 5 star director which is featured in  the magazine. To go along side this the title of our movie was in bold red with a horror looking title. I wanted to edit the photo to look more spooky and motioned as when Ellie was turning around she didn't look spooky but mainly like a mug shot photo which is why I included a motion blur so it looks as if she is moving while running away.