Progress on magazine cover

The image for our magazine cover is of the final girl which was captured by Karwin. We decided that the actor would be shown in role of her character as she is a victim and looks frightened.


Here is how our film magazine cover looks now (uncompleted), as we have made drastric changes to it.
We agreed to change around the colours, whilst keeping our colour scheme black, white and red.
We also changed the style of the masthead 'TOTAL FILM', because the inverted trees didn't work well and looked too busy.

Conventions that we have used;

• Large masthead
• Button
• 'FREE' Slender Man poster
• Unique barcode
• Main image
• Plus sign
• Cover lines
• Pull quote

Adding features: Film reel

This was a still-shot of Slender Man that I took from the trailer. I wanted to insert it inside the film reel, along with other shots of the films that are featured on the magazine.

I simply copied the image and pasted it onto a new layer of the front cover.

Here is another image from 'The Texas Chainsaw Massacre' that I took from Google and pasted into the film reel.

Film magazine

Working on 'Slender Man' poster

Working on the poster;

Step 1- original image

This was one of the images I had captured earlier on, and I thought it was strong enough to work for our poster. 

Step 2- edit image and add lettering 

I right clicked the image layer, clicked on the 'black and white' option and then altered the contrast levels so that the image is dark and spooky. After doing this, I added the lettering 'Slender Man' onto a different layer.

Step 3- Adding effects to text

I then filled the text in with black using the paint brush tool. Next I right-clicked the text layer and added the 'stroke' effect, which gave the lettering a white outer glow.

Here are 2 other ideas that I tried out;

I used the gradient tool to add a green and white faded colour on the 'Slender Man'. The use of green, relates to the green trees and grass, which may look quite effective considering that our colour scheme may be black, white and green.

For this one, I used the 'smudge' tool and roughly smudged the trees in horizontal lines. I think this look interesting and relates to the 'TV effect' used  in the trailer by Cleo. I might work on this idea and see what my group members think of it.

Lettering for poster

Working on the Lettering for our poster

This was something that I created on Photoshop CS3. I simply used the text tool to type in 'Slender Man' in a 'Times New Roman' font, and then used the 'liquify' tool (by clicking on image, adjustments and liquify). 

The liquify tool is a tool where you can drag the text to create a warp effect, which I think will look effective and portray Slender Man's features as he has a long and very slim body shape.

Here is another design, similar to the first one that I created whilst experimenting, and trying out different styles. As our poster will be a picture of the woods, I thought that the green lettering will look effective and will emphasise the dark and scary location.

Audience Feedback.

Once the two rough cuts were completed, we showed it to two sixth form members and our media class, considering that they all fitted in with our target audience.

The feedback we received was both positive and negative. However, we took the negative feedback as constructive criticism which we can work on in order to improve our trailer.
The two sixth formers said that they really liked the music and the heartbeat sound effect.

Overall, our audience feedback was very useful as it gave us an insight of how to improve our trailer and provided us with different opinions.

Rough Cut 2.

This is the rough cut that Cleo had created on iMovie. It is effective and portrays our ideas as a group of the trailer. For example the location of the woods and fast camera movement. This rough cut may be merged with Karwin's rough cut to achieve a great trailer.

Rough Cut 1. A2 Media Studies

This is a rough cut that Karwin made which includes more of the scenes that were recorded of the teenagers breaking into the houses and wondering around. We all agreed that our trailer will look effective it this  was merged with Cleos' rough cut. The beginning of the trailer looks quite professional with the 'Lionsgate' opening  which then fades into the woods.

However this is only a rough cut, so some scenes need to be altered, for instance, running scenes are a little repetitive.

Working on our magazine cover

Here are some of the ideas that we all came up with as a group for our magazine cover.

• We have decided that we will use the Total Film, rather than Empire
• Glow-up masthead (relates to the image, where the final girl will be holding a torch)
• Website & issue number on top of the 'M' of 'FILM'
• Main image. of final girl in foreground, and Slender Man hiding in the back
• barcode on bottom right corner
• We might add a spine
• Button ('FREE......')

Here is our flat-plan which I drew, so that we had an understanding of what our magazine will look like.

We then added the conventions of 'Total Film' magazine such as the the barcode, button, puffs, plus signs, bleed outs, freebie section, pull quotes and title of film. As you can see, we have included two freebie (top of magazine and middle left of magazine) sections, as we still need to consider which one we want to use.

Analysing magazine covers

Features and conventions of front cover magazines;

Here is a short prezi that I created which shows the conventions of 'Total Film' and 'Empire' magazines. As a group we will then choose which magazine name we will follow.




After discussing as a group, we have come to the conclusion that we will be following the conventions of 'Total Film' magazine.
The reason behind this decision was because 'Total Film' is more comical which is something that we can use and even subvert with our Film magazine. Also, Slender Man is a fictional character which emphasises the comical look.

Rough idea of flat plan

Editing images for our poster

We wanted to test out our different ideas for our poster.  So this is something that myself and Karwin created on Photoshop, with the help of this YouTube video tutorial. To create Slender Man, it was a simple process where we used an image of a man wearing a suit (from Google) and stretched his arms using Photoshop. Then we simply coloured in his face and hands with the paintbrush tool.

We then placed Slender Man on an image that I had captured earlier and edited (made darker using Photoshop).




















Finally, to put Slender Man behind the tree, Karwin  cut and paste the section of the tree so he can be hidden behind the tree.
Although the image looks quite effective, it also looks rather plain and not quite scary. However, this was only an experiment to see whether our idea was strong enough for our poster. 

Images for magazine

Here are a few images that I had taken for our magazine cover, so that I could then edit and play around with them on Photoshop.

I captured the images at a vertical angle, so that when editing later, I will not have to crop and stretch the photo to make it vertical.

Edited images

Whilst filming for our trailer, we captured a few images( of the location) that we can use for our magazine cover. They were then edited using filters and adjusting the contrast and brightness levels on Photoshop.

Trailer Ideas/Mini trailer

Here is a mini trailer that we may use for the opening of our horror trailer. It was edited on iMovie, which is a fast editing software. The clip includes extreme high angle (shots of the trees), handheld camera shots (of victim running) and long shots. These type of camera angles are useful for the opening as they expose the location (where Slenderman lives) clearly to the audience. 
It is not in narrative order, which was something that we noticed whilst watching different horror trailers. Therefore, our trailer will follow conventions of horror trailers.
For our real trailer, we will take more clips of characters, including a range of different camera shots.