Magazine cover

I Decided early on to design my cover for an issue of Empire magazine. It’s a magazine that I personnally subscribe to and enjoy, and therefore I have an understanding of the visual language of the magazine.

Empire issues have a modern, “edgy” look to them. More akin to lifestyle magazines like GQ or FHM than the “stuffier” industry magazines such as sight and sound. Infact Empire quite often share cover stars with FHM which strongly presents it as a masculine magazine.

Unfortunatly when it came to putting my cover together I found that the on set photos we had taken, and that I had intended to use werent going to be suitable. Due to the fact that our actors head was missing the top. This meant that I had to re-shoot with Lloyd in a make shift studio (a toilet cubicle in the college).

Luckily these photos gave me more scope to edit and I could direct him into poses suitable for an empire cover.

I recreated the magazines famous typography using Adobe illustrator’s pen tool and then transported it into my photoshop file.

I decided to make a caution tape effect, again using the pen tool but this time in Photoshop, and to add some distressed texture to the back drop in order to reinforce the content of the film.

Castle cove is intended to be a crime thriller with gritty british social-realism adding simple semiotic devices such as these helps to connote the tone of the film to the magazines audience. This is then anchored by the tag line “..indy thriller cinema.”

Over all I am happy with my cover. The quality of the photograph has hindered the edit quality but, content wise the signifiers are all there. And the photos that I took would help with my web page.