Final Products

Below are the final products we created: the magazine cover and the film poster for Talbur Manor.

Weekly Update for Magazine Cover

Week One

This was the final phase of our practical assessment after already completing both the trailer and the film poster. 

The first we thing we did was to look again at different influences. We had the option of basing our magazine poster on the existing ones made by 'Empire'. We thought this was probably best so that we had a framework and we could develop our cover in different way, by building on idea we saw from existing magazine covers. We looked on the Empire website at various different covers and found it quite hard to find one of our genre, as a lot were of the wrong type of genre. We eventually came across finding the cover for Iron Man 2, and even though it's more of a Sci Fi genre, we liked a lot of aspects used in it and we thought we could work with for our cover.

We again, did the magazine cover on the PC programme Photoshop. Before we began building our poster we had to look at an original cover from Empire Magazine to use as our influence. We chose Iron Man 2 and used a series of factors that we liked from the cover on ours

Week 2 

This is when we began putting our magazine cover together. The first part we concentrated on was the background, the title and the text that we were going to show. We had already decided that the main block colour we would use for the background would be black as we thought that we could then use stronger, brighter colours for the rest and it would stand out well. When we tried to put in the 'Empire' title on top of the background, was when we encountered our first problem. We typed out the title simply enough but when trying to change the colour to red, Photoshop would not let us do this and simply just stayed as a grey colour, and everytime we tried t o do something, new layers kept on appearing.. This issue proved very time consuming and we had to restart Photoshop a number of times. Eventually, we were able to change the colour to red, and then add on the outer glow effect, something we wanted to keep the same as our poster (the actor’s names). 

The next step in making our cover was to advertise the other films included within the magazine. On the Iron Man 2 cover, we liked how the other films were displayed, with the picture shown of each film, and then the writing on the right of the picture, We decided to change this idea slightly by using a film strip template, and inserting the pictures of other films into each section. We simply just got a template form the internet, and then began to research into what other existing horror films were out in November this year. One which we included was ‘Paranormal activity’. We placed all three images onto the film strip and placed the title of each film below. Again, we used the idea of the glow effect for each title which we thought worked really well. We then found out from the guidelines, that you can not use real films on your cover. At first this proved an issue, but then we came up with the idea of using other films that our classmates had made and after asking them to make sure it was ok, they were fine with it so we just took images form each of their films and replaced them on the cover.

The next step was to add on the barcode and prices etc. We used the same prices as on the Iron Man 2 cover and used their idea of having it just above the ‘M’ in ‘Empire’. We thought this was a good place for it and it proved to work well. We got a barcode image form Google and decided to place it on the bottom right hand corner of the cover. Another aspect of the Iron Man 2 cover we liked was the circle image which included the ‘Ultimate review of 2009’. We thought this was a effective way to show another feature within the magazine and the shape worked really well against the background. In order to create this aspect, we used the shape tool on Photoshop to create the circle, and then placed the text inside it after deciding to go for ’50 ultimate horror films of 2009’ as we thought this coincided with genre of our film well. After experimenting with different effect we could use on the circle, we decided to have the same red colour used in the title for the outline of the circle, giving it a slight glow effect and then for the inside, we thought we would use white so the text was visible and also used another effect called 'Bubble shadow' which gave a glowing effect in the middle, and then gradually got darker around the edges of the circle. We were really pleased with how this turned out and decided to have it in the same place as on the Iron Man 2 cover, just slightly overlapping the end of the title. 

We then created the ‘Talbur Manor’ title, and we used the same two colour effect that we had used on our film poster, to have ‘Talbur’ in red and ‘Manor’ in white. The use of the box around the tagline on the Iron Man poster we thought was a really good idea and made the text more noticeable. We created the same effect on Photoshop using the shape tools and thought that they way they looked together worked really well. 

The final part of the magazine cover was to create the main image. We had already decided that Chloe was going to be the only person on the cover and that this should work well. As the images of Chloe on the trailer were too blurry to use, we took some more pictures at school. We and took a number of different pictures from different angles and after looking through them, we decided to use the picture of her just looking straight at the camera. We then uploaded this onto Photoshop and began cutting out all the background behind Chloe. We found this quite a time consuming task and we definitely realised you need a steady hand! Once this was cut out, we darkened the image slightly using one of the tools and then placed the image and our cover was finished! 

Magazine Influence: Iron Man 2

We chose this edition of Empire magazine to use as our influence because it creates an intense atmosphere that we would like to portray.

The main image on the posters is simply just what could be perceived as a head on shot, with no angles or anything being used, just the character fully facing the reader. The way he is looking at the reader could perhaps represent how he wants to entice them in and read more on the magazine. The majority of the 'man' is shown in the image, with the main focus being on his upper body. The image clearly dominates the magazine cover with a grey and blur colour theme occurring in the other aspects of the cover such as the title, tagline, features etc, but the main image uses such different colours which is why it is so eye catching to begin with. The overall feel of the cover is fairly dark, perhaps to represent an action/thriller film that Iron Man 2 is. The use of the lightning effect on the title again, links into the genre of the film possibly representing the darkness within the film.

The use of only one image is done well as it clearly shows Iron Man's dominance and power he may hold over other characters in the film. The way in which his head is tilting down almost looking at the reader again represents his power and the way he possibly looks down over other people.

The cover strongly focuses on the film Iron Man 2 that is being promoted by the image of the main character. It gives the audience a clear indication of what film it is promoting and also without the film title it will be clear as to what the film is. I really liked the use of the other teasers at the bottom of the page and the idea that the images used are not the usual film poster that audiences will recognise, but that they are infact still shots taken from the film itself. This shows the action in the films and also the main characters which will appeal to the audience because they will be the main factor that someone will remember. There is also a small tagline for each teaser which has been shown which i personally film is too much because it takes away the main action from the main film they are trying to promote. However, they are not too overpowering and do not stand out as much as the main film's tagline should. The Iron Man 2 tagline is clearly highlighted as more important because of the text book around it and the boldness and capital letters for the font.


The colours used for this cover is red, white and blue, typical colours that are used for action films perhaps leaning to the fact it is aimed more at men as it is known as a heavy action type film and just from the layout if the cover, the genre is clear mainly due to action aspects such as the 'lightning' effect around parts of the text. I think the target audience would be for boys ages 14 to around 20 as the sense of power of the Iron Man simply jumps out at the reader, something which many teenage boys will be interested in as well as all the action that takes place throughout the film as from just the effects such as the lightning one used on the cover, it is clear that this is an incredibly action packed film.





The lead article on the cover, of course being Iron Man 2 is not just promoted by the image. It is also promoted by the use of the ‘First Look’ text on the left hand side of the cover. ‘All hail the king of 2010’ promoted the film incredibly well as it suggests it is going to be a massive success, the use of ‘King’ is of course such an important character throughout many films and it simply reinforces just how important/domineering this character is.

The use of a short, but powerful tagline also works incredibly well as it is simply a set of words that people will remember- ‘New suit. New enemies. Same attitudes. With the use of alliteration between the first two sentences, its shows how the new film will be exciting as new aspects will be discovered. Then the last sentence- ‘Same attitudes’ represents the fact that Iron Man 2 is still the dominant character and shows an instant link between the first and second film- If people have already seen the first film, then they can instantly relate back to it, as well as discovering new things abut the current film.

Overall each aspect of the cover such as the main image, insight into other films and the 'lightning' effect show that this issue of Empire magazine is clearly based on the action genre. From the use of an overall dark effect it shows that what's inside the magazine will appeal to those who love action type films. I think the cover is done really well and all the aspects compliment each other and it is certainly a cover that would stand out to me when perhaps seeing it in the shops.

Weekly Updates for film poster

Week One

The first lesson after we completed our trailer was spent on the poster for our film. We researched possible influences for the poster and concentrated mainly on the films 'The Eye' and 'The Last House on the Left'. This gave us a rough idea of what is expected on a horror film poster. The main factor we took away from this research is the idea that on a horror film poster not alot about the film is given away. The main idea of the poster is to intruige the audience into watching the film and draw them into the feeling and emotion behind what is going on within the film.

Following the research into film posters we began to sketched out possible ideas. First of all we considered using the two main characters of our film: Chloe and Holly to show how they are linked. We intially thought of having Holly in the background to show her being from the past and a headshot of Chloe in the foreground to show her being the inferior and in the present. However, as we did not want to give too much away and we wanted to leave the audience in suspense as to what really happens in the film, this idea would not work. Also our trailer does not give much away as to who the little girl is and we wanted to continue this idea of not knowing who the killer is, therefore, this concept for the poster would give away too much to the audience.

After we looked at the film poster for 'The Last House on the Left' we built on the thought of what is the main focus from our film, which we decided was also the house. Therefore, is seemed more sensible to use the house in a similar way that it is used on the poster for 'The Last House on the Left'. Once we decided to use the house as the main target for our poster we had to consider how we would actually use it. We had two possible options which were either to centre the house or to have the house as the main background which is much more overpowering. We wanted to overpower our intended audience thus we chose to follow up the idea of having the ' Talbur Manor' house as our background for the poster.

Week Two

Our main focus for this week was to begin the production of the poster. We had all of our ideas on paper and we just needed to transfer all of our thoughts onto Photoshop. As we were not all very confident with using photoshop it took us a while to get to grips with all of the features and generally how to use them. From filming our trailer, we took some location shots and some of them were of the house we used. The ones we did have looked really good and clearly showed a spooky atmosphere that is portrayed from the house surrounded by the nature. Therefore, we did not have to go back to the location and used the images of the house we had. We resized the canvas and image size of the file to the expected size of a film poster.

The first feature of the poster we experimented with was the production logo, MACK. We designed the logo on photoshop and saved it as a JPEG file so that it was easier to place it onto our poster. Once we placed our logo onto the poster we had to consider what the best position on the page was for it. We felt that because we were going to have all of the credits at the bottom of the page the production logo was more suitable in the bottom corner so that it is visible but does not take the attention away from the other features. We resized the image to an appropriate size and placed it on the bottom right hand corner of the page.

The next step we took was to import the image of the house onto our poster. As we wanted to continue with the colour theme of red and white, we thought it would be a good idea to split the page in half and have one half in black and white and the other with a red tint, to show the past and the present of the evil and wickedness Chloe was portraying in the film. We had difficult at first trying to figure out how to use a red tint effect but once we found out how to do this we had gone off the idea. The reason being that the black and white shows how the time has gone on from the action of the film. Also because the main focus is of the house by keeping a black and white theme, it shows how the house is the history as black and white suggests old and something from the past. However, we still wanted some red in the poster to break up the darkness of it. So we continued with our idea of using the red and white text colour from 'The Last House on the Left' for our film title. All of the other text we had on our film we kept in white so that they are visible and readable but also match the other colours on the poster.

We had a consistent font throughout the trailer and we wanted to link the trailer to our poster through the font we used. We used the font Optima the title of the film, the credits, the tagline and the starring characters were all in this font. The only different between them was the font size as some of them are much more important and need dominating. For our film title, TALBUR was in white and MANOR was in red. We centred the title and made the font fairly large so that is stands out. We also wanted the names of the characters to stand out in a different way to the main film title. We experimented with different text effects like shadows, colours and textures until we found the outer glow tool. We really liked the way this effect makes the text stand out and we could chose the colour we wanted the glow to be as well as how powerful and bright we wanted it.

We experimented with the blurring tool and thought it was a good idea to blur the surrounding of the house in order for the house to look bolder and stand out more. This took a very long time and after a while of blurring different parts we finally saw a difference between the parts we did blur. The blurred sections looked vivid and soft compared to the building of the house that looked strong and sharp against it.

We wanted to add a review to the poster and our first idea was to have a star rating at the top of the page. We found it extremely difficult to find the right star to import to our poster. First of all we used the star symbol on the key pad which looked like *, but it did not have the same effect as an actual shape of a star. Finding a star was really hard as all of the ones we tried to use were either too small and when adjusted became blurred or were the wrong colour and we could not change the colour. Finally we found a black star on google with a white background and imported this onto a new file in photoshop. The star was upside down so we rotated it and changed the colour of the star to white by using the fill bucket tool. Using the quick selection tool we selected the star and cut and pasted it into our original file for the poster. As we wanted a 5 star review we copied it over 4 more times and resized all of them to fit the page correctly. We were amazed by the use of the zoom in and out button and this helped alot with the finer detail.

When we wrote the credits at the bottom of the page we had to decide what information we wanted to show. On other posters the starring characters names are usually mentioned alongside with the production company, directors name and producer. Once it had all been typed we noticed that there was a surname missing off one of the actors names. We clicked on the text tool to change this however, it kept appearing with a new layer and not editing the one we wished it to. This went on for a long time and we simply could not edit the text we originally typed. Therefore, as a result of this we had to delete this text and re-type it ensuring there were no errors.

Once we thought we completed the poster we double checked all of the information on it to make sure it was correct and that everything we needed to be on the poster was on it. However, we had a small feeling that something was not quite right with the image of Talbur Manor. We did not want to over edit it with effects and make it look takey, which is when we came across the darken effect. As our film genre is horror, by darkening the house we would make the house seem more isolated and create a larger impact of an eary and spooky atmosphere. Therefore, the outside of the film poster was darkened which created a dark and tense feeling.

Below is our final film poster.

Poster Influences

In terms of the film poster to go alongside the film trailer we made, we had to research and observe different film posters in the same genre as our film. The genre for our film is horror therefore we had to look into the factors of a horror poster and see how we could make our poster similar.

Before we began our research we decided that it would be a good idea to somehow use the house 'Talbur Manor' as one of our main images in order to show our audience what the film is mainly about without giving too much away.

One poster that we found was for the film 'The Eye' starring Jessica Alba. The poster is shown below:We thought that the eye in the above poster stands out and definately catches the audiences attention. In our trailer we use Chloe's eye at the end of the trailer to give the audience a clue into who the mystery murderer is therefore, we initially thought using the eye for the poster would link the two together and would work really well. We wanted to adapt the eye above by having a blurred image of the child in the pupil to create mystery. Another idea we had was to have still shots of our film faded around the pupil of the eye to show some action from our film. However, we concluded that this would be too much for a film poster and we decided that we did not want to give that much about the film away. We also liked the simplicity of the eye above and thought that the idea of not giving much away on a poster would work really well with the intentions of a horror film.

The second film poster that we used as our influence is for the film 'The Last House on the Left'.


We were drawn to this poster because of the darkness of it. When we discussed possible ideas for our poster, we all agreed that a horror poster should be dark and create an eery and spooky atmosphere. This is what we liked about this poster and thought it could work really well for the eery atmosphere we want to portray. Another link between this poster and our film is the focus on the house. Our trailer for our film 'Talbur Manor' focuses on the house we are showing, which is similar from this film poster, as the house is the main focus. This is shown by the image of the house being the only one on the poster and also the allignment of it being centred and the only brightness on the page, which immediately draws attention to the house. The colours used for the titles on this poster work really well together and our colour theme for all the text in our trailer is red and white. The red definately stands out against the dark, spooky blackground of black and catches the readers attention as the red is dominant. Also the colour red suggests blood and danger which will also conjoin with the concept and theory behind a horror film.

On this particular film poster we liked the idea of not giving too much away in terms of text therefore, this is something we would definately use in our poster. We feel that the only text that is needed for a horror poster is the credits and a short and snappy tagline promoting the film.