Rachel's Research into Ancillary Tasks - The Magazine Cover

In order to research what should be included on my magazine front cover I looked at many different covers. Firstly, to decide which magazine I was going to create a cover for, I looked at 3 different types of film magazines: Empire, Total Film and Little White Lies. In order to see what the different covers were like I looked at each of the covers for the same film. All 3 focused purely on the main two characters of the film.

• The Empire cover featured both characters in mid shots. There was a colour scheme of blue, grey and yellow in the text featured. It featured the main title of the film and also a lot of plugs for stories featured.
  
• The Total Film cover featured a quite close up shot of just one character. The picture is in black and white and the text around it follows a colour scheme of black, white and red.
  
• The Little White Lies cover shows a picture of a main character converted into a pop art kind of style. Most of the Little White Lies front covers have this artistic approach and only have the main title of the film and do not feature any plugs, puffs or teasers etc.
  

From looking at these three covers I have decided to make an Empire cover as it has more conventions to play around with and I much prefer the design of the Empire front covers.

Now I have decided to do an Empire cover I will analyse Empire covers more closely to find consistent themes that appear throughout all the covers and the conventions that appear on every Empire cover. Below is my Empire cover analysis, please click on the image to see an enlarged version.