Making of the Magazine Cover

After looking at other covers, the first step was to take a few pictures. We took some photographs of Elliott (the Time Detective) against a white background in a variety of poses, and then uploaded them to iPhoto to have a look and decide what would be best. Here are the images that made it to the shortlist:





It was a tough choice, so decided to find out how each image would look once we had cut it out and put it against the magazine title and other features on the page. To make the magazine we used Adobe Photoshop.

To create the title, we went onto dafont.com and looked through hundreds of free fonts to find a few that we could use. Once the font was decided we put it on the page, changed the colour and cut out a star shape in the 'O' to give the logo a Hollywood feel.

I wanted to go for a more simplistic colour scheme to give a better effect, and so that the page was not too complicated, so I desaturated the photograph - but highlighted the tie and made it a prominent red colour, removing the blue spots from the original image. I also filled in the glasses to make them opaque so you could not see the eyes. Issue information, a barcode, and a free poster offer were then added:





I didn't like the plain white background so, in a new layer, I drew some grey straight lines and then blurred these to make it look like you see above.

We needed to think of a selling line for the magazine related to the theme of the movie, and what we came up with was 'Time Fighters', which then evolved into 'Fight Against Time'. While playing around with the text to make it fit in and look good, I changed the colours and size of the poster offer which I felt was too big for a minor feature.



Looking at some of the popular magazine covers we analysed beforehand, it became apparant that ours didn't have enough going on, so we added a main feature and an 'AND' section to tell the audience what else would be in the issue - using the names of some other groups movies and also fictional movies. A brief description underneath 'Fight Against Time' was also added.

We did try to add other features, but it made the magazine cover look too cluttered and took some of the focus off of the character. This is our final magazine cover:



Steve.