Total Film

This is a typical film poster from well-established magazine Total Film, immediately you’re able to identify that the magazine is well-established because the character featuring on the front cover overlaps the magazine headline, suggesting the lack of importance the name has because everyone is so aware of the magazine and what it entails. The magazine cover features the obvious main character or main feature of the film that it’s promoting, however I don’t think there’s more to why this specific character has been used; I feel it’s because it’s worldwide famous actor Johnny Depp, if he’s featured on the front cover it’s inevitable that he’ll be recognised enticing the viewers to buy the magazine issue. Another thing that draws the audience into buying the issue is the word ‘FREE’, everyone loves free items so writing ‘FREE GIANT IRON MAN POSTER!’ should lure the audience in, it’s also presented in a large font of a different colour to reinforce and strengthen this idea.  The magazine title is the largest piece of text on the magazine cover, which could have been done to present the genre of magazine it fits into; e.g. showing the viewer’s it’s a magazine based on films, essentially it could be this way because of the well-established name it upholds therefore increasing sales. I like how ‘TOTAL’ remains in the ‘FILM’ text, this could be cleverly done so that no added space is needed to fit in the entire title’s text as ‘FILM’ is so large. If recreating a magazine cover like this I feel this has inspired me to imitate it however using independent creativity however based on this original idea. I immediately got the impression that the film the magazine is promoting is based on a sort of thriller genre because of the dark mysterious background colours used, paired with the white text. However the only element that contradicts or challenges the convention is the character featured on the front, as stated before he is very famous and recognised however he is not the main character. This is a clever marketing tactic though because the popularity of the actor would entice the target audience to buy the magazine, he is in full make up that distorts his original appearance however as his name is featured I still believe people would recognise him.