Magazine Cover:

This is our magazine poster, we edited this using Photoshop. We really wanted a close up side shot of Megan looking down regretfully holding a gun. Once we were happy with our desired shot, we began editing it. We decided to make our entire film poster black and white, we feel like dark colours represent crime and violence, which are all things you find in an action film. We also took inspiration from the James Bond Empire film cover, as his photo is taken in black and white. We like the way that in black and white you have to look closely to see the gun, this shows that Sienna is quite a secretive character, she isn't your normal crime film character. On other Empire magazine covers we noticed that there was often competitions that were advertised to win things, as this would attract more people to buy and look at the magazine. We included our slogan 'London's Greatest Secret' at the very top of our magazine, we did this because we thought it would be a good idea to closely link all 3 of our products; the trailer, the film poster and now the magazine cover. All 3 of our products include this slogan, therefore the audience know that the advertisement going on is for the same film. We also included a feature telling the reader theres a film review inside and a exclusive interview, both of these will attract people to read the magazine.

To create our magazine poster, the first step was to obviously take an appropriate picture of Megan, the film poster we took inspiration from for this photo was the film poster for Colombiana. We loved this pose, so decided to recreate it ourselves, but closer up as we feel a magazine poster needs to be more personal to the star of the film. We also felt that a black and white themed color scheme fitted better with our magazine poster as this represented the crime genre more. Therefore we needed to find a EMPIRE magazine logo, which was in black or white. We were unsuccessful in finding a EMPIRE logo which fitted within our color scheme. However this wasn't too much of an issue, as as we had already decided that we wanted the entire color scheme of our cover to be black and white on Photoshop we set it up so that all layers would be in black and white.
Next we selected our image, as our actor was a busy person and we knew she wouldn't be available very often to be able to take photos for our magazine and film posters we made sure we took as many photo's as possible of her so that we had lots of variations of shots that could potentially be used! This really worked to our advantage as it gave us a chance to ask our peers which photos they liked best and gave us a chance to have a closer look as to what the photos bought across about our film.
These were our first shots of Megan....
This was our first image. We really liked this image of Megan as the pose was good and we really liked the white background. However we noticed that a shadow appeared over Megan's face, this was something that was a really big problem to us as we knew that in our magazine cover we wanted to heavily focus on the actor in our film as that is what magazine covers are often there for. Another problem which occurred was that the photo was taken length ways, the photo could be cropped but to fit the  appropriate portrait film poster size the image would have to be cropped, then stretched onto the canvas onto Photoshop creating a lower quality image.

 This was the 2nd image we took. This image was a potential image as it was taken portrait meaning that it fitted the canvas. However we still had the problem with the shadow on Megan's face because of the low angle lighting we had created with a lamp. We knew that when editing this it would be a problem as Megan's face would be darker than everything else. Another problem we established was to do with Megan's pose. We started to dislike the way we had positioned her as she only had one hand on the gun. We feel like this made it look like she had less power and that the gun was something which was there only to look at and not be used. Therefore we decided not to use this photo. We also felt that the gun was far to close to her face and it just looked like we were trying to stick the gun in to the shot.

The last image we put into consideration was this one. We both really liked this close up of Megan holding the gun as we feel that the pose in this presents our movie really well. She is holding the gun in both hands looking down on it in a meaningful way which shows power and control of the character in the film. We decided to change the background of our image once we started to take more and more shots, we feel this background would go better as a magazine cover as it is glittery and has a nice sophisticated effect. Also the gun sort of blends in to the background, meaning that you have to look closely to see it. This is an effect we really liked as we wanted to get away from the idea that the gun was just being stuck into our film poster to show there is going to be violence involved in our film, we wanted it to look like something which was there for a reason and we feel Megan's facial expression, pose and the way the gun blends in with the image all present this. Another thing we really liked about this image is the lighting. To get this lighting effect with a shadow in the background we had to move the lamp around quite a lot until it showed Megan's shadow in a way which we were happy with, this did take quite a while but we feel like the end result is worth it. We really like the shadow effect as it is something which adds a dramatic feel to the photograph.