WEEK 20

This week I designed my proper magazine cover.
The pictures of the two boys are 2 main characters in my film. I tried to go for a stereotypical look of a student when taking the pictures. By stereotypical look, I mean someone in casual clothing with like a bag over their shoulder – a school bag, also the headphones around his neck go with the image. With the image on the right (Calvin Demba) I played around with the tools in Photoshop including the smudge tool, to give him a more troubled look on his face, this was done to increase the tension. With the image on the left (Marlon Sr. Douglin) I decided to cut out the majority of his body on the right side as I positioned him to appear behind Calvin on the actual magazine cover. I decided to make Marlon look to the side when taking the photo, as he looks like a ‘lookout’ for his friend Calvin and as these 2 along with others get in trouble they need all the help they can get.

For the background I used a blackboard with "I will not disturb the dead" written on it. This was made by simply getting a picture of a blackboard, finding a font that looks like chalk and then writing the text onto it. I made the text look as if someone had to write lines. I came to this decision as sometimes in schools when someone gets in trouble one way of punishing them is by making them write lines. They’d have to repeatedly write out something they should not do, in this case the lines read ‘I will not disturb the dead’, reflecting the plot of the story; in which, the protagonists go somewhere where they shouldn’t go to a certain place as it’s a site of where a class of students died in 1986 (hence the name), this causes the ghosts of the dead to react. I also added little images of bloody hand prints across the board. This represents the students trying to break away from the ghosts as they’re being “tortured”. The hand prints on the board show the students regret “disturbing the dead”.

For the grungy, dirty looking effect on the main image and background I found a picture of a piece of old paper and placed it over the image, and then set the blending mode to 'Multiply'. I done this to make the image seem more dark and dirty, as the genre is horror these are generic conventions. Giving the whole image this sort of grungy dirty effect it takes away this sense of innocence, their innocence of youth is jeopardised when they break the rules, however this may be a simple mistake they make whilst young, something they can learn from if they do conquer this paranormal encounter.
There is also a subtle light source coming from the left side of the image which was created by using a soft white brush, and then using Gaussian blur to spread the light around.

To get the worn out effect on the title of the film "Class Of '86" I first typed it out normally, rasterized the type, then started rubbing out areas of it to make it look old.

The "magazine of the year" stamp near the top right corner was made by me, using shapes and text.
I got the picture of a barcode off the internet and added it to my magazine for realism.

The rest of the graphics on the magazine are all shapes, text and screenshots of movies, found on the internet.

For the masthead I used a font known as ‘Devil Breeze’. I liked this font as it seemed modern and can appeal to fans of films of all genres. As it does not look like a font for a specific film type, it can be seen as a broad-spectrum font. It also appeared perfect for me to use as a masthead the way it looks across the top of the magazine.

Here are a list of the fonts I used

Devil Breeze - Masthead

Arial

Arial Black

Arial Narrow

Calibri

Trajan Pro


Impact

Garamond