Final magazine cover

This is our final magazine cover above. Our magazine cover took a lot of hard work as we had difficulties choosing our final picture but in the end we managed to turn all difficulties to our favour. We are happy with how the magazine cover looks and hope to continue improving.

Magazine cover progress day 2

In the lesson today, we picked up from where we left of yesterday. We decided to crop Fiona out of the picture so that we were able to edit the background to make Fiona stand out in centre of the magazine.

 To sum up, we managed to crop the image out and edit the final background using numerous effects; we used an artistic 'neon glow' effect on the background then used a more darker artistic effect on the image itself. This is how it looked in the end:


We then began to add titles, captions etc. onto our magazine cover. Though, we were not able to finish doing everything on our magazine cover so we decided that we will continue to work hard and finish to hand in our final piece as the deadline for our magazine cover is tomorrow.

Magazine cover progress day 1

 

In today's lesson we managed to do quite a bit with our magazine cover. Although, this was not straightforward as we came into the lesson we had  a plan for what photo we are going to use and so on. We ended up spending most of our double lesson trying to cut the image out of the picture leaving us with the background so we could create a gradient effect. As we wanted to go for a look that seems would be on studio magazine and from looking at examples we wanted to use a very similar idea. One of the main issues we had with this was editing and being able to use the tools well on Photoshop such as, 'Quick Selection'; we intend to watch some videos on you tube that would help us. Our idea later changed as we still wanted to cut the image out of the picture but to then change the background to black so we can get a gradient effect of black going to white as we saw on this studio magazine:




We were finding difficulties in trying to edit the image that we had chosen as the actress was sitting on a pole and we did not want to rub all of it out as it looks like she is sitting on air as well as the fact that it was quite difficult to ' refine the edge of the picture. We ended up changing the picture that we wanted to use from the one on the left to the one on the right:
As the picture that we are now going to use is taken on quite a nice background we want to keep the background but also maybe use a gradient effect. We will continue on with this in tomorrows lesson, hopefully everything will go to plan.

Cover Shoot

During this week, we have been collecting all of our ideas and research in order to deliver the shoot to the best ability we can. Therefore, as mentioned on the last two posts, we have been looking at all sorts of magazines , then we were inspired by film magazines and also UK and US Magazine covers. At the end of the week, we decided to go with Studio Magazine and to have Fiona on cover, not in character.
We've found similar titles to the actual magazine titles, which was very encouraging at this stage as we would like to impress and engage people via the cover. One of the reasons why we've chosen Studio Magazine is because of its insight. The magazine includes fashion, Hollywood news and engages the female attention which is exactly what we want to do by putting Fiona on cover. As our specified audience is female, the cover will hopefully stand out. I have taken variety of photos of Fiona using my digital camera Nikon S8 and ones that we admire can be seen below:

Overall, the cover shoot went very well and we are happy with final photos.

Looking at fonts

As we made the decision in yesterdays lesson that we will be making a studio magazine for our film. After talking with our teacher we realised that we have to find font that matches with the actual 'STUDIO' font on the magazine. We know finding one that is almost the same will be quite difficult to do but by doing research and looking at the websites that our teacher has given us we hope to find one.

We came across these two types of font we thought matched with the 'STUDIO' magazine name. We hope to get  feedback from our teacher about these fonts and possibly make a final decision. Though, we will continue with research for different fonts.
Today, we continued to look at fonts. We liked the second font but we thought it was too thin compared to the actual studio magazine title. We decided that we would go back on the website to see if we can possibly make the text bolder; which we managed to do. We now think that the text we found and the studio magazine titles is very similar. Though, we are yet to receive feedback from our teacher to get another persons opinion rather than just me and Mimoza.

This is the actual studio magazine title.

Survey

Making final decisions for our poster

      

Both these magazines inspired us the most in making our decisions with our magazine cover. The magazine cover on the left has already been posted on our blog as part of our initial ideas; we re-visited this magazine cover in our initial ideas and gained more ideas from it. We thought of the date of our film which is in February so we decided that our magazine will be released in January and will be a 'Limited edition'. We also make a couple more decisions which is shown in the draft of our magazine cover below:

We are also currently looking for a font to match the title of the magazine 'Studio'. We need to find one that of exactly the same but this will be hard so we intend to find one that is very similar. We intend to look on this website: http://www.identifont.com/ which was recommended by our teacher.

Magazine Cover Influences

As I have discussed couple of my ideas with Dolapo, we agreed to choose well-known magazine such as Empire, Total Film. The genre of Once and Again is romantic drama, therefore 'Little White Lies' won't be exactly the right magazine choice for the genre. Although, we know that our film appeals to a specific genre. Below are examples of magazine covers that inspired us by the structure and font of the titles. 

We really like the idea of having 3 characters faces on the cover, because the film is all about the love and tragedy occurring between Alex, Claire and Stella. We have created our final film poster and it features soft colours, a romantic frame of childhood friends, therefore it does not bring the dramatic feature of film's ending. I would really like to have that tension or mystery between the 3 characters on the cover. Also to mention Empire Magazine prefers to go with comic-con action films so we wanted to change that idea and make it our own, so that the name of magazine EMPIRE will stand out and so as our film as a different genre will  catch reader's attentions.


After receiving feedback from our teacher, we started to look at magazine covers of Studio. Studio is the first women's film magazine, and having Fiona (Stella) on the cover with titles in red and her wearing clothing in same colour tones can be very effective and sophisticated compared to other film magazine covers. Below are examples from Studio:

Here on the right is a magazine cover which features the famous US TV Show, "Vampire Diaries". I found the photo very effective; close up of their faces and attention to detail caught my eye. We could potentially have Alex in the middle and two other girls on side of him. Even though, just by looking at the front cover you wouldn't think this has any connotations to our film but we were able to get some ideas from this magazine cover. We thought that the idea of the three characters on the magazine cover was interesting because that is the main focus. We also liked how this may be  romance film but the characters expressions are not only conveying romance but some kind of drama.

Magazine ideas

Even though, today is the deadline for our poster, we know that we are going to start designing our magazine cover straight away  So far, I have been researching examples of magazine covers for romance films. I realised that for the magazine cover there are two approaches that we could take: we cud either have all three of the main characters maybe posing together for a picture on the front or we could have a picture with two or so of the characters posing closely together on the front portraying romance.
Not really keeping in line with these two ideas, I thought about maybe doing a triple slip screen with all three characters with a broken line in between possibly. I spoke to Mimoza about this idea and she also thought it was good. We are still currently thinking of this. Here are some of the magazine covers that I looked at and discussed with Mimoza:

 

                      
After talking to Mimoza she found a good website where there are magazine covers for loads of different movies with a variety of genres. We came across one particular film poster from the movie twilight that we thought was quite interesting for our film. Here is the magazine cover:

       

When looking at this magazine cover on the left, also trying to keep in mind the fact that we have two female characters as opposed to two male characters, so this could either be an advantage or disadvantage for us. We thought that maybe using this idea in the sense that Alex would be standing in the middle with Stella holding on to him as she is clingy and over protective as she doesn't want Alex to go back with Claire. On the other side we would just have Claire maybe gazing at Alex.
With the image on the right, this is actually a poster but we thought that we could possibly get some ideas from this poster for our magazine cover. We thought of the idea of maybe having Fiona watching / looking at Claire and Alex.With the main focus of our magazine cover being Alex and Claire. We are not sure about this idea as we thought it would suit more of a male character to be watching/ looking at the back rather than a female one as well as the fact that it wouldn't really go with our storyline.

Final Film Poster

Here is our final film poster. After having many difficulties using Photoshop as well as the computer being very slow and even crashing, we finally got there in the end.

Film Poster so far

Below is what I've been doing so far to create the film poster. Our draft and ideas might change, but we hopefully will develop and put all of our efforts and dedication into this film poster. We have experienced photoshop softwares before this project, however I was only familiar with simpler softwares such as Photofiltre, therefore learning and experiencing adobe is a challenge. I really like the new version of Adobe Photoshop CS6, because there are variety of options and features of the software that let people work professionally, although we are not technicians. As seen below, first step to do was to leave the picture on its own and get rid of the background, in order to replace the new edited background. So, we had to create layers and also work on each photos brightness and saturation. Then, we use the healing brush tool to remove flaws or any spots on their faces. The background image was first edited on instagram then later followed by an extreme edit, using Adobe Photoshop CS6. We hope our poster turn out to be how we would like it to look like and will attract the target audience.

 

This poster above was another try just to see what it looks like. I agreed with Dolapo that the rose as the background is not necessary and creates no meaning to the actual film itself. Therefore, later I tried to remove the rose background and stick to the 3 images above. However, the poster suggested more of a rom-com rather than romantic drama, due to its plain white background. We came to final decision that we are definitely sticking to our second poster above, mainly because the atmosphere of the poster is very suitable for a love theme and it has an emotional meaning for the characters, Alex and Claire. Poster brings them back to their past, the first place they met and also which is included in the trailer. 

Photoshop in the lesson

In the lesson yesterday  keeping in mind the troubles that I had with Photoshop the day before and the fact that the computer kept on crashing, we attempted to use Photoshop again in yesterdays lesson. This was ok as throughout the lesson we tried to edit our pictures neatly, with help from watching some you tube videos. We found it hard to take out the background under the characters hair on the poster as if we just rubbed it out it would make her hair look very weird and look so obvious that the picture has been edited. Due to this taken up our whole double lesson, we decided to stay back at lunch time. Consequently, we couldn't stay back so had to leave as our computer crashed again.
I could not come into school today as I have a university interview so it was only Mimoza working on our poster. I will later talk to her and see how she progressed in the lesson and talk about what we need to do and how we are going to do this.

Using Photoshop

Due to Mimoza  being very ill today I worked by myself. At the beginning of the lesson today I had to go to tech block where Photography is as I had to transfer the pictures onto my USB so that I could then put it on the mac. When I came back to the lesson I uploaded to the pictures onto Photoshop straight away. The computer then began to be very slow so I couldn't work on Photoshop or even go on my blog. After asking my teacher for help I had to restart the computer then was able to use Photoshop .When I used 'quick selection' to edit the picture I then needed to zoom in a rub a bit out, Photoshop was not allowing me to use the rubber.When I asked for help this ran into the end of the lesson. As a result I was not able to do much work in the lesson except for editing one picture. I hope when Mimoza joins me tomorrow we can do a lot during the double lesson that we have as our deadline to give in the poster is on Friday.