Firstly, I filled the background with black to follow the colour genre conventions and added an action shot from the film as the main image for the spread.
Secondly, I added the same film title from the poster to the spread to keep the brand recognisable across all promotional products. I positioned it here to make it look edgy - going across the boarder between the image and the text, and to make it as big as possible because the title of the film is the mia thing you want the reader to come away from the article knowing.
Next I added two stills taken on set to make the spread more visually interesting with multiple images. These stills show the fight scene and the location.
I then added the info bar, telling the reader the film's release date and the magazine's star rating of the film. I gave it four stars as this is a promotional piece and the better the rating, the more likely the reader is to go away and watch the film. However, giving it five stars would be unrealistic due to the small scale production and it being the first narrative film that I have made.
Next I created a cast and crew box to tell the reader who made the film and who it stars. This box is white and so it constrasts from the dark colours using a reverse of the black and red to make it stand out, but the text in the box is blakc and red making it still conform to the colour palette of the spread as a whole.
To add the text I used InDesign, where I set the shape of my text and made it all equal in length, and then I copy&pasted it onto my Photoshop document so that it is more professional than created it on Ps and also it makes the text easier to move around as a whole without have to move several text boxes around.
To make the smaller images look neater and stand out more, and to conform to the common convention in film review pages, I found a film reel brush to put on the images. The design splits each image into two, but this can represent how the genre and how the film is diorientated and jerky in places, as well as giving each part of the image a focus as opposed to seeing the image as a whole.
A convention of most magazine articles is to have a quote from the text much lare in order to draw in the reader from their first glance of the article. Knowing this, I decided to put my quote in the middle of my text, hence the gap from before, due to the already busy nature of the spread and so that it breaks the text up instead of being one big section. The quote I chose is one of the most positive points from the review, so that even if the reader were not to read the whole article, but just that quote, they would be informed of a positive right form the off, and the font choice is chalk-like to imitate the kind of scratchy writing you would find on the walls of a cell in an asylum, mirroring the plot.
At this point I felt that the image needed something more to make it fit better with the page, and so I found a blood splatter brush to create the background of a caption box so I could say what the image was. This use of a red blood splatter is symbolic of the content within the film, and also adds more colour to the spread to make it look more appealing to the reader. The contrast of the whote of the text makes the text stand out against the splatter and adds to the occasional brighter colour that constrasts and make the article more appealing to look at.
I filled the final gap with a banner that says 'Short of the Week'. This alone helps to promote the film by saying that of all of the short film sthat the magazine may have viewed, this was their favourite and therefore this is a promotion to the reader by saying that they should watch it. The use of black and white creates a reverese, making it stand out, and the futuristic font makes the section of the magazine recognisable to film, and for anyone who reads the magazine regularly.
Lastly, I added the page numbers in the bottom left and right corners. This helps the reader to navigate through the magazine and easily find the article if they wanted to go straight to it from the contents page. The colours are black on the left and white on the right so that they stand out from their background and are lost in the images.
