Ancillary Tasks: film magazine cover and poster

From my research, I have found out that western films very rarely feature on magazine covers. This is most likely down to that they are no longer a popular and proliferant genre, despite well-recieved, well-liked and good quality modern western films being released in recent years. Due to the lack of covers featuring western films to analyse and draw conclusions from, I have had to research elsewhere for examples to refer to.

The publication 'True West' is a magazine devoted to 'preserving the American west' and occasionally features covers about western films. Its illustration and styling are very traditional and reminiscent of the classic westerns of the 'Golden Age of Westerns'; a style I feel our group should attempt to emulate in the house-style of our production. 

Recently, the film 'Cowboys and Aliens' was released in an attempt to reboot the western genre by crossing it over with sci-fi. The film magazines that featured the film had very different approaches to how ro represent it - some choosing to show the sci-fi element and others the western conventions.

To the left, 'True West' magazine, although not a film magazine, has a more dominant western style where as 'Empire' uses a much more modern, sci-fi style. When we create our magazine cover, we will need to consider which style to choose and whether it will tailor to our audience.

The film 3:10 to Yuma kept the same traditional house style throughout its marketing, was aimed at fans of westerns and hoped to reboot the classic style of the genre. This is similar to our ideas about the production so to emulate this style would be an option. Alternatively, we could use the same approach as True Grit, combining traditional typography with photography to create a more minimalist style than the old posters which were often crowded with a lot of different images.

By studying these films, we can formulate ideas concerning the format of our film magazine cover and promotional poster.

 

 House-style:

 This traditional style would include images that appear to be hand-drawn or painted in a sketchy but realistic way; impactful 'western' fonts such as 'Rio Grande', 'Carnevalee Freakshow' and 'Woodcut' from the font site dafont.com; feature key elements of the mise-en-scene of westerns such as weaponry, horses, steam trains or elements of costume like hats;

 more text than conventional for other films (poster); possibly a weathered, dirty appearence - shown through textures; dark colours based in browns and yellows and strong poses by the characters featured.

Initial ideas:
We have decided to name our production 'The Eagle' after the protagonist so here I have tested some different typefaces and colours to see the effect created.