magazine cover

Film Poster

Total Film- research for magazine cover ideas

Total Film, published by Future Publishing, is the United Kingdom’s second best-selling film magazine. It offers film and DVD news, reviews, and features. The magazine was launched in 1997 and is published every four weeks (13 times a year).

Features

Each month, TF provides a range of features, from full-length interviews, with established and up-and-coming actors and directors, to major film previews, from Top 100 lists to retrospective pieces — all illustrated with film stills and profile shots. All issues contain The Total Film Interview — an in-depth chat with a celebrated actor or director, along with a critique of their body of work and a rating of each major film to date.
In 2004, a Total Film survey of 25 British film critics produced a list of their Greatest British Films of All Time. In 2006, Total Film released a magazine featuring the top 100 films, as selected by a readers' poll.

Sections

Screen
The main cinema reviews section. Major releases receive comprehensive coverage, with a star rating out of five and the magazine's own Predicted Interest Curve — a graph that demonstrates which moments of a film are likely to hold the viewer's attention. Also briefly listed are similar recommendations under "See this if you liked..." Smaller films receive a concise review and rating. The end of the section is devoted to the current U.S. and UK box office charts, TF's own "Top 5" and summaries of any films that were not reviewed in time for that month's print deadline.

Buzz
(Formerly two sections entitled "Access" and "Rough Cut") provides details on upcoming films including new releases, film events, new talent, interviews and fun articles.
Lounge
(Formerly "Spin") is a home entertainment guide, including latest DVDs and (occasionally) soundtrack CDs, movie-related books and games. There is also a periodic retrospective of a particular film, entitled "Lounge Loves", as well as other large-scale features that are DVD-related.

The Total Film Quiz
A four-page section generally includes a montage round, a crossword and a variety of questions. Answers to the montage and crossword are made available in the next issue whereas answers to the quiz questions are readable with a mirror in that specific issue.

Each month, TF offers a DVD or other film-related prize for each published letter. Additionally, TF features a monthly competition, which can be entered by post or text message. Prizes are usually hardware.
The magazine usually finishes with a one-page parody of a recent release entitled "The Abridged Script".

Former American offshoot

In September 2000, Imagine Media, a U.S. division of The Future Network, plc. launched Total Movie, the American offshoot of Total Film. A major selling feature was the enclosed DVD with each issue filled with trailers, game promos and short films. Some of the latter included the Star Wars/COPS parody, Troops, The Dancing Cow (directed by Taz Goldstein, and photographed by renowned cinematographer John A. Alanzo), The Killer Bean 2, The Second Comeback and Paranoid (adapted from the poem by Stephen King — the first Dollar Baby ever released on DVD). The publication lasted only four editions (#1 Sep/Oct 2000, #2 Dec/Jan 2001, #3 Feb/Mar 2001, #4 April 2001).
Total Movie was then purchased by Versatile Media One who picked up where Imagine left off and published issue #5 in October/November 2001. Total Movie folded once again after issue #10 in September 2002.

Foreign editions

Licenced local editions of Total Film are/were released in many countries like Turkey, Russia , Serbia, Croatia (no longer published), and others.

Total Film Forum

Since 2004 a number fans of both films and readers of Total Film magazine have been sharing their views and experiences on the Total Film Forum. It was started in 2004 and has grown since.

British film research for possible magazine cover

The british film magazine was the first an online site that covers the best of british talent, which combined the talent of people around the world both infront of the camera and behind. This magazine can be read in up to 50 countries. In the year 2005 it became a one hundred and eight page magazine for people to read about the films and DVD's being presently reviewed.
This magazine is showing the success of britsh film makers and actors, which is why we felt this would be an approriate magazine to use, as it looks positively at the Bristish film industry.
However we could not use this magazine, because later we found out this is not a proper published magazine it was actually a website, which is www.britishfilmmagazine.com
So therefore we could not use this because it was not a real magazine that could be brought from the shelves in shops.
We also experienced problems with another magazine choice. As we wanted to use Empire Magazine to advertise our movie. However we released that Empire Magazine only tends to advertise Action movies that are quite masculine. So this means that our chick flick movie Miss-Fit would not be suitable for this type of magazine.

Example of magazine covers

These are examples of the magazine covers we looked at:

Teenage movie and Chick Flick Posters

"MEAN GIRLS" and "A CINDERELLA STORY"

These posters that we looked at were very helpful. We analysed the layout of the posters from the following films: mean Girls, Not another teen movie, a Cinderella Story and She's the man. With the mean girls poster we liked the use of colour and the way in which the characters are placed, as you can already notice a divide between the social groups just by looking at the poster. Although it doesnt give too much away. We decided the base of poster ideas mainly on the mean girls poster, as the outfits and positioning on the characters were quite symbolic to the genres signifiers.

The poster on the right was for iconic teenage movie Mean Girls. As you can see from the poster is looks very girly with the use of pink, reds, revealing clothing and high heels. The background is very plain, which makes the purpley/pink writing stand out from the background. This posters is mainly what we decided as a group to base our poster on. We liked everything about the poster. So when we later created our own poster to advertise our media product, we had mean girls poster on our mind. We also looked at many other film posters but they were not as suitable for our film as this one above. For example we considered A Cinderella Story's poster layout, but this was not right becasue it was based on a well known fairytale that has been given a modern twist, whereas our film is more like mean girls. The poster for A Cinderella story is shown below:

As you may notice the colours used on each of the posters are very different. The mean girls poster is more girly and uses all ways to catch your atention, which pretty girls in revealing outfits, to colourful bold titles. Whereas A cinderella story is more basic and has an inncoent approach, as a white background is used, the title is in a blue colour, which is not stereotypically girly. Also the girl character "Hilary Duff" is not viewed in a sexual and seductive way, if anything she looks like a tom boy who wears a dress with trainers, althought the trainers are pink this could sigify the fact that she is still a girl who is soft and innocent. The fact that she is on his back on the poster shows friendship and again perhaps an innocent attitude to their relationship, whereas mean girls is more suggestive and poster creates the idea of more sexualised girls that are aware of the looks and power. The girl in a cinderella story seems alot more unaware of her looks.

Considering all the ideas we discussed we went for a mean girls style as the characters in our film "Miss-Fit" have a simialr attitude to mean girls characters.
Chelsea, the lead character in our film "Miss-Fit" is very similar to Regina George in "Mean Girls". however our geeky character Lily has simialr qualities to Sam Montgomery in "A Cinderella Story".

Time plan dates- begun 14th September 2009

Filmed-

September -14th (Walmer Science College)- Used Dolly
-21st (Castle)
-28th (Walmer School)
-30th (Beth’s House)

October – 5th (Danielle’s house)
8th- ( Walmer School)
12th (Walmer School)

Half term- no filming (10 days away, home research)



Editing time:

September- 17th (captured all clips and decided on the best ones to use)

24th- (more batches capturing of the clips that we recently added)

October- 1st ( storm room 1 taking turns on the editing as a group )

14th, 15th, 19th, - editing

November- 2nd- Editing storm 1

Questionnaire Feedback

Before we decided on what type of film genre we were going to have, we decided to create a questionnaire that would help us choose. We wanted to ask teenagers male and female what types of films they enjoyed watching. We focused on chick flicks mainly, as we were intrested in seeing whether if attracted a male audience as well as females.
From looking at the reaction from our questionnaire the majority of our target audience are females, as they enjoyed this type of film. The girls also said they would take a male partner to see this type of film. Teenage girls and some of the boys tend to go to the cinema to see comedy films. From our questionnaire the reaction was very positive. Many of the people we asked liked the idea of an English version of a chick flick, instead of being too similar to an American chick flick. This was because different countries have different ways and if this film was made in England it would be easier for our audience to relate too.
We wanted to know whether the audience wanted to see a fight over a love interest, as this is a iconic situation within a teen film. We wanted to find out specifically if they wanted to see two guys fighting over a girl, or two girls fighting over a guy. They chose the idea of two girls fighting over a guy because this would have a more comedy aspect to it, as the girls in chick flick tend to have over the top cat fights, which is very bitchy and this would make it alot more entertaining to watch from an audiences perspective. In addition to this idea, the girls we asked felt that this situation would be more relateable to them as they could imagine themselves in a similar situation. This quesitonnaire really helped us decide what was best. It also made us feel more confident about our ideas, we also think that the use of generic signifiers would make the film easier to relate to, for example the popular bitchy character "Chelsea" would wear provocative clothing and the geeky character "Lily" would wear casual, baggy clothing. So therefore it is easy to see the difference between the two social groups. Teenagers also like to see the Bitchy girl destroyed, and the geeky girl move further up the social ladder.