Codes and conventions of Film Magazines

The most significant code and convention of a movie magazine is the masthead, or the magazine title, the companies who create these magazines need to make their magazine stand out amongst competition in order to survive in the economy we are in. They do this by trying to appeal to their target audience, this can be done in numerous ways. A simple way is keeping the colour scheme in check with the genre they are trying to sell. This way passing customers can easily identify what type of magazine they are looking for.

movie magazines will often have other conventions to entice their audience similar to movie posters magazines will often have their film star or stars as the focal point. This is because the audience will feel compelled to look out of interest of their favourite actor, or even because they feel familiar with the person. It is surprising how a large group can be more persuaded to buy a magazine due to the actor on the front, in our example there is a exception, because batman is such an iconic figure is it more suitable he is shown on the front cover, due to its overwhelming popularity it is assumed many know the part is played by Christian bale anyway. This in total creates a unique selling point for the magazine.

In our example below the colour sets the theme of the film, there is predominantly black and white used. The red writing is made to stand out as it is not the usual convention of a magazine this makes it eye catching as it seems as if the cover has been gratified  until further inspection shows it is intentional, by then the audience has already taken interest and may be more convinced to read on.

Patterns of Intertextuality

This is how each of the following texts in this case 'Magazine covers' are similar to each other.

Here is a  Magazine cover also made by total film which has many striking reassembles to the Batman cover above. A few examples of this is they both a have a specific colour scheme which runs throughout and both show the main character  focused within the centre of the page.