Magazine inspiration

As well as looking at posters, I wanted to look at film magazine covers to inspire me when creating my own. When browsing the internet, I came across a magazine website for the magazine 'Film Comment'. On the website for the magazine, it describes a brief history of the magazine; 

"Film Comment is the official publication of the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Founded in 1962 and originally released as a quarterly, Film Comment features reviews and analysis of mainstream, art-house, and avant-garde film making from around the world." 

The website http://www.filmcomment.com/ includes an archive of previous issues, and many interesting articles on film. Here are some covers from Film Comment; 

As you can see, through time, the magazine has developed and changed its style, but its simplistic cover and professional fonts and colour schemes make the covers look effective. Even the photographs, which in many cases appear to be action stills from the film, (or composed to look this way) are effective and I hope to produce something similar to this when making my own cover.

Previously in this project, I looked at magazines such as Rue Morgue and Little White Lies which are both magazines that I find particularly inspiring, however, due to the lack of the right facilities, I don't think I would be able to create such a graphic based cover for my own magazine. Both of those publications rely heavily on the cover artwork that is used, and if I had more time, I would have loved to have had a go at designing my own illustrated cover. I have decided to look at Film Comment in more detail as the cover photography will be similar to my own skills, and creating a magazine cover that would have the similar conventions to this is much more realistic in the time scale that I have been given for this brief. 

I also analysed Total Film magazine as part of looking at the campaign for The Wolverine film. I found these magazine covers to be too focused on blockbuster films, which means that the trailer for our film (which would probably be an independent film) would not be featured on the cover. Even though Film Comment also features popular films, the cover photography is much more simplistic and suited to my ability, where as the a lot of the photography on the cover of Empire magazine seems to be computer generated. Being an A level student means that I don't have the facilities to create this effectively either, so Film Comment seems like a much more suitable choice for the source of my inspiration.