Evaluation - Using conventions of real media texts - magazine

For part of my marketing campaign, I had to create a design for a magazine front cover that advertised my film. Before I was able to do this I had to do research into the conventions of magazines to see hat as appropriate to put one my cover, and hat would make it look authentic. 

Magazine covers

What I first did was look at all the different types of magazines and had a looked at who their target audience as and what genre they were portraying.
Within this post, I looked at 20 different publications. Each of these different publications tell us a little bit about who they are directing to and what there magazine is about. 

There are many different publications and the 2 I focussed on was Fangoria and Empire. This is because these 2 contrast so much and I either wanted to do a high budget film magazine or a genre specific magazine. 

Fangoria - The magazine is mostly targets teenage audiences. Fangoria is an internationally disturbed US film magazine specialising in the genre of horror, slasher, splatter, and exploitation films.

Empire - Empire organises the annual Empire Awards which are voted for by the readers of the magazine. Focuses mainly on mainstream Hollywood blockbusters and the cover often features images of Hollywood stars or recognisable characters from franchise movies. Empire is a British film magazine published mostly. It is the biggest selling film magazine in Britain and is also published in America, Australia, turkey. 

As you can see by looking at these magazine covers that they vary very differently due. For example Fangoria is very genre specific and everything on the magazine cover is to to dir horror/thriller films. The tag lines, cover lines, centre image, masthead all portray horror thriller. 
However Empire portray all big budget films from any genre. 

I then did further research into Mainstream magazines and Independent magazines 

Detail analysis of mainstream film magazine

Detail analysis of indie magazine




This  research allowed me to look at both mainstream and indie magazine. At first I wanted to do a mainstream magazine magazine, but when by doing this research no horror films came up on the front cover of mainstream magazines which made me realise I should look into more indie low budget magazines and see if it would be more appropriate for my idea and my research has made me change my mine. 


When researching the conventions of magazine front covers, I looked at 2 different kinds go magazine - a mainstream, and independent magazine.

I did this to see if they shared the same conventions regardless of their target audience. Even though the magazines are very different, they still portray similar conventions. From doing this task I discovered hat conventions of magazines are very similar no matter the genre. Therefore it helped me to understand what conventions I needed to se but it also taught me that I needed to stay them a certain way to portray my genre. I looked closely at target audience, font and colour. 

Analysis of 2 magazine covers

This research shoed me that I need to include these conventions on my magazine to make my magazine look realistic. 
For example they all have a mast head but they are in different fonts and colours.



Development of my magazine cover




Conventions of my magazine cover




Comments

Popular Posts