Front Cover: Proposed Final Cover

My first official piece of coursework! A film music magazine cover.

Front Cover: Construction

Presentation not working? Click here to view online.

Front Cover: Photography

I did my photoshoot this week in front of a grey sheet. I chose a simple guitar for mise-en-scene, as many film score composers choose one instrument to map out the first drafts of their songs with and move to larger orchestras later. I think that more audience members will be able to relate to a girl holding a guitar.

These two pictures had to be scrapped mostly because getting a best friend to be your model in a school project always spells disaster, as proven here by the inappropriate faces you see. They were also scrapped because the poses weren’t quite right—in the first, you can’t see the full guitar, and her hair is covering her eyes. I thought the second would be casual and interesting, but it holds no relation to the genre when she’s not using it properly. 

These were gotten rid of for the same reason, although the expression is much more acceptable. You can’t see the full guitar and the picture sends the wrong sort of message for my magazine. 

I finally settled on this picture, which has almost the full guitar in the shot as well as a nice smile and an accurate demonstration of how to play said guitar. The focus is perfect, there’s lots of space for a masthead, and I think it’ll be a great shot to use for my magazine cover.

Audience Research

For my audience research, I chose to do a quick and easy questionnaire with ten questions in order to get my results in as soon as possible so I could start planning properly. I allowed two weeks for my audience to answer my questionnaire and I got 21 responses. These were my results and what I've decided to do regarding them.

From these first questions, I can establish that the majority of my audience were males aged between 26 and 35. Almost every single person that answered my survey agreed that music was an important part of film, so this is most likely my target audience. However, almost as many people were females aged between 15 and 25, so my audience could also encompass young females. I will generalise my audience to adults of both genders.

These questions were to narrow down what my target audience would be drawn in by. The respondents' favourite genres seemed to be science-fiction and comedy, so I'll try and include those in my sell lines on the magazine, along with a popular composer. Eleven of the people who took my survey gave names of their favourite composer, and the most mentioned were Hans Zimmer and John Barry. I will try and feature those popular names on my cover, too.

Font Testing

Possibly the most important feature of a magazine cover is the masthead. It's what most audiences look at when they search for a magazine. My music magazine will be called 'SCORE', in relation to classical instruments and film score music, so it's important that I have a font that says traditional, but has the modern magazine twist.

These were the fonts I found.

For that all-important second opinion, I asked my sister (who also has experience in scored music) which font she thought was best for a music magazine based around film score. She suggested the first (which I'd been leaning towards originally), because it looked more regal with its bars.

With a bit of a recolouring to suit my magazine's theme, I ended up with this masthead: