Final Products (Magazine & Poster)

Magazine Cover

The magazine cover needed to mirror an actual issue of Empire Magazine as closely as possible; to this end we copied the basic layout and logo the magazine franchise uses, it has a price tag and barcode so that it resembles a legitimate magazine.

The primary goal however, was to promote our product as much as possible to make it memorable in the minds of a potential audience, so we opted to use the VIGILANTE logo and make it huge on the magazine cover, so that it was the first thing that audiences would see. With it we included the tag line for the film, to further aid continuity. These are both overlaid on top of the central image of the magazine.

The main image features the two central characters of the film, in the same costume they wore for the film poster, providing more synergy, however their roles are reversed somewhat, with the serious character behaving comically and the joker character looking more serious, we chose this image particularly as it makes the actor’s seem out of character. And the spotlight may be on the actors and not the characters, which may have interested readers who liked the actors.

Finally, we decided to feature different films on the cover similar to ours to appeal to what David Gauntlett described as the “pick-and-mix reader” so if one of these perked the reader’s interest who are more likely to like comparable films to ours, and would be more enticed to buy the magazine.

Poster

The Film Poster was designed to jump out at the viewer, as such I the colours I used were primarily black and red, which contrast strongly with each other and make our poster stand out, with the red more prominent and the black I used to make the red stand out even more. Using my research I observed that red invoked ideas of danger and action in a viewer, so I included it into the text specifically so as to get across the action side of the film rather than blatantly point it out.

My Muse

The main characters are the focal point of the poster as they are for the trailer and the film itself, their personalities and the way they interact with one another really made the film we felt and I wanted to capitalize on this in the poster, on the left, James takes a classic superhero pose head tilted up as if contemplating, a well known, even cliché pose made popular by early superman, unbeknownst to him Rob is mocking him with bunny ears. This image represents the comic side of our film.

As stated in a previous post the fist links with revolutions and uprisings, symbolic of the power of might, which is, essentially, what our film is about, albeit taking a comic twist on the matter. as well as breaking up the plain black of the central image the fist serves as iconography for the film franchise as a whole, not only appearing at the end of the film trailer accompanying the title but also being used within the film as part of the “Justice Posters” being put up, giving some continuity to the franchise as it sort of mimics the posters in film, but with obvious differences. Nevertheless, it creates a sense of franchise to the products, linking them.