After receiving some audience feedback from my peers and feeling
unsure about the magazine cover myself, I decided that I would still keep a lot
of my initial ideas but start to construct the magazine again. The main
audience feedback I received was in regard to my choice of main image and some
of the colours, and from this I decided to experiment with different images and
use a more simple, conventional colour scheme of solely red, black and white.
For my initial draft of my second attempt, I kept my idea of
the film strip along the bottom with some upcoming releases in the genre, as I
thought this was really effective when seen on other film magazine covers and
from the audience feedback I received, I felt that they thought this was the
most effective part of my first cover attempt. I kept the same 'Empire' masthead
and increased the size slightly, and this time placed the barcode landscape
just beneath it to increase the amount of space that could be used down the
right hand side. I included the same 'Delilah' title but again increased the
size of this so it was more of a main focus of the cover. The biggest initial
change I have made is the main image itself, as I chose a different image
completely, and changed it to black and white as well as adding a red tint to
our character's eyes. This allows the image to appear a lot more sinister and
fit more with the conventional features of a typical horror villain.
Next, I firstly added some dark red blood splatters to the
background of the image, but reduced the opacity in order to make them more
subtle and not detract the focus from the main image itself. I also added some
more basic conventional elements of the magazine cover such as the web address,
the date and price, and the strapline of 'The world's biggest movie magazine',
which is partly covered by the image as can often be seen on other 'Empire'
covers. Above the masthead, I used my previous idea of the '30 page horror
special' but in a different layout, using a clear and bold sans serif font in
order for this to be easier to read. Lastly, above the film strip, I created a
'Plus' text, which will act as a buzz word, as well as looking more
professional than my first cover attempt in the way that it is presented.
For the final stage of my magazine cover construction, my
most important task was to add the cover lines and finishing touches. As shown
above, for my cover lines I used the same ideas from my initial cover attempt
but chose to present them in a different, more professional way. However, for
this cover I chose to remove my previous headline of 'This Year's Most
Thrilling Release' and instead include a smaller subtitle that says 'World
Exclusive' as I felt this allowed the reader to focus a lot more on the film
title, and the cover itself looked a lot less crowded so it would be easier for
a reader to focus on the individual components in more detail.
