Media Timeline- Magazine Cover

Magazines began as an upbeat variation on the bland newspaper format. Over the years we have seen magazines that can appeal to all genres of matters such as music and film. Magazines can differ dramatically, offering creatively different renditions of covers and writing styles for a mass audience.

The use of magazines have featured since around 1852 when mills in Germany began producing wood pulp for paper making, replacing rag-based paper for newspaper and magazine printing.

The 1900s was a time in which we bagan to see some of the mainstream names that continue to publish even today. Photoplay, the first magazine for movie fans was released in 1912.

Mainstream magazines broke new ground with the release of Reader's Digest, The New Yorker, Time, Newsweek, Esquire, Life and Playboy in the years 1922-53.

The first use of colour advertising was used in UK magazines such as The Bolton Evening News in 1962.

Rolling Stone also began to demonstrate the popularity of special interest-magazines 1967.

The Cosmopolitan UK is the first international edition and went on to become the world's best selling women magazine in 1972.

Entertainment Weekly starts up in 1990. This is a major magazine about all things media related that is still running today.

A massive inspiration for my magazine cover is Empire Magazine. Empire is a British film magazine which covers some of the largest releases to come to the cinema. They began in 1989 and still continue to cover film related news today. Their visual style relays on the characters, pushing story and other details into the environment and their props. This results in a great standout look that will immediately catch any reader/movie fan's eye.

Media Timeline-Film Posters

Film posters were only produced for the exclusive use by the theatres showing the film they were promoting, and the copies of the posters were required to be returned to the distributor after the film left the theatre. In the US, film posters were usually returned to a nationwide operation called the National Screen Service which printed and distributed most of the film posters for the studios between 1940 and 1984. The NSS regularly recycled posters that were returned, sending them back out to be used again at another theatre. During this time, a film could stay in circulation for several years, and so many old film posters were badly worn before being retired into storage at an NSS warehouse (most often, they were thrown away when they were no longer needed or had become too worn to be used again).

It is often assumed that the first film poster was created in 1890 for the short film 'Projections Artistiques'. The poster was created by French painter and lithographer Jules Cheret.

Posters can be broken into three categories which include:

Lobby cards

Lobby cards are collectible and values depend on their age, quality, and popularity. They usually feature in sets eight and each features a different scene from the film. Films released by major production companies experiencing financial difficulties often lacked lobby sets, such as Manhunter (1986). Lobby Cards were popular with older films and featured in films such as From Russia with Love (1963).

Teaser poster

A teaser poster is an early promotional film poster. The poster contains a basic image or design which avoids revealing too much information about things such as the plot, theme, and characters. The purpose is to raise awareness and generate hype for the film. A tagline may be included. There are some instances when teaser posters are issued long in advance before the film goes into production, although they are issued during the film development. Examples of this include 2012's The Dark Knight Rises.

Character posters

For a film with an ensemble cast there may be a set of character posters, each featuring an individual character from the film. Usually it contains the name of the actor or the name of the character played. It may also include a tagline that reflects the quality of the character. Character posters are common within big franchise films with pre-existing characters. 2015's Star Wars: The Force Awakens has released character posters for it's upcoming debut.

We can see a number of ways in which the film poster has developed over time. From films such as Gone With the Wind and The Jazz singer in the 1920-30's period, we can see that posters relied heavily on artist renditions instead of images from the film. These posters would give barely any of the plot away, focusing mainly on the genre instead of the story.

From around the 1960's period onwards, films began to blend art with real photographs within the film posters. The posters featured bold art instead of the cookie cutter format that had been used before. The james bond franchise and the star wars franchise would give the audience more of an insight of the story and surrounding characters of the film.

Now that tools such as Photoshop have found mainstream success, they have begun being implemented into the creation of the modern day movie poster. Some franchise such as Star Wars implement a classic artistic look to their posters but others go for a more minimalistic approach, using real images blended with reality while avoiding clutter within the frame and teasing what is to come. The fundamentals of the poster remain the same, the protagonist is often put front and centre of the poster with surrounding characters and elements being pushed to the side. Some of these films include Inception and Avatar.

Media timeline for film trailers

People would pay 5 cents in movie theatres which would allow you to sit in for as long as you wanted. Since the show times were not precise, short films and cartoons would be shown as filler between showings. 1913 would mark the beginning of the film trailer era.

A man named Nils Granlund made a promotional short film for the Broadway play 'Pleasure Seekers' which was made up of rehearsal footage. Obviously the idea of showcasing adverts between films was a great idea for the theatre owners and as a result more and more theatre chains began adopting this idea.

'The Adventures of Kathlyn' would have each instillment end with a cliffhanger, placing a character in danger or in peril. Each segment would end with a title card or something similar, encouraging audiences to come next week in order to view the outcome of the scene. This was the first example of a film trailer, to promote the idea of watching the continuation of what the audience were shown.

Big directors such as Orson Welles attempted to change the way the audience perceives trailers by bringing about their own style to each one they made. This originated when Welles used his and mercury theatres combined popularity to promote their first feature in the form of this trailer for Citizen Kane (1941).

A new wave of big name directors continued to bring about a new wave of trailers, further expanding what can be possible within this medium of film.Alfred Hitchock was among these directors, he would have trailers famous for breaking away from the conventions by taking the audience on a tour of the set, as can be seen in this trailer for Psycho (1960).

Censorship laws began to weaken their grasp on film trailers, Anti-heroes such as Bonnie and Clyde could be shown in trailers of their own, once again changing the foundations of what became a modern trailer.

Around the time of the 1970s, films such as jaws began to change the ideas surrounding distribution strategies. This was the first successful film to see a wide release. The trailer had been shown a lot during the summer prior to its release, eventually being shown in over 675 theatres after just a month of being released. Universal had put in $700,000 into television advertisements and in its first week alone, the film had made $7 million back with a total box office of $470 million world wide. This amazing result would pave the way for most films to use this strategy and invest in the use of trailers for big box office returns. This also marked the era of "the voice of God" being incorporated into trailers narration.

Eventually trailers began to adopt the idea of fast paced, choppy edits. This was called the MTV cutting style and became increasingly more common and with it the trailer would continue to change into what it has become today. We now have various trailer types, from theatrical, teaser, international, TV spot, to red band and green-band. The idea of what a trailer should consist of constantly changes, allowing more creative freedom for film makers to promote their film.