Slender Man Magazine Cover

Part of the task was to create a magazine cover featuring my
production. I chose to create an ''Empire'' magazine cover so as
to demonstrate photoshop skill in creating as close a replica to the actual magazine as possible.

The original image was first airbrushed- this is done by creating a duplicate layer, blurring (''Gaussian blur'') the bottom layer, and carefully erasing appropriate parts of the top layer. This was done on the actress's face to eliminate skin blemishes and on the Slender Man's face to eliminate the woven fabric pattern on the mask.

The Slender Man's head was marked out and copied, then pasted in the same location so that the magazine title could be placed between the two layers, creating a 3D effect which contributes to the professional look of the cover.

The ''Bloody Mary'' film is one of my fellow media student's productions, and this was included because Empire magazine often features upcoming films in addition to the cover story.





Here is an image of an actual Empire magazine cover for comparison:

As you can see, the side panel of ''Bloody Mary'' and the text about Jessie Campbell closely mimics that of the ''Batman vs Bane'' and ''Nolan Talks'' text. These are placed here as the eye is naturally drawn first to the top left of an image because this is the way English language reads.

The right hand side of the cover is used for additional article titles, specifically here about the Oscars.

Research into Horror Cinema (Conventions and Cinematic Idioms)

The task for my media studies A2 was to create a promotional package for a horror movie, and as such it required research into horror as a genre as well as the typical audience for a horror movie. This included checking trends in horror sub-genre online, interviewing friends, and using genre convention to maximize audience.

AUDIENCE

The largest audience a horror film expects is the 15-25 year old male, and the typical horror film caters to this by including several conventions such as:

-The protagonist is often a sexualized female (see Clover's ''Final Girl'' trope)

-Violence and direct physical conflict

To cater to the largest possible proportion of this audience, the age rating to aim for would be a 15 certificate, allowing the film to include the nudity or violence that this audience enjoys (consciously or otherwise) whilst also not cutting off a large section of the audience as would happen in an 18 certificate film.

USE OF EXISTING HORROR CONVENTIONS OR ''TROPES''

The largest horror trope made use of in my horror film is the ''Urban Legend'', which displays the story or elements of the story as originating in the real world. My promotional package is for a movie about ''The Slender Man'', which has been one of the most popular horror icons of the past 3 years, and specifically drawing from Marble Hornets, which is a cult Urban Legend video series on Youtube.

The ''Urban Legend'' is effective in film because it adds another layer of realism and draws the audience into the story more, and this works very well in the case of the Slender Man because of the large amount of ARG's (alternate reality games) established on Youtube, with Marble Hornets' ''Totheark'' puzzles being a good example of this. The producers of the show made an alternate Youtube account pretending to be the character Totheark from the show and posted enigmatic puzzle videos for fans of the show to solve, drawing them further into the Slender Man mythology and increasing its fanbase from simply a cult following to a full horror trope of its own.

The Slender Man as a concept even goes as far as to "Break the Fourth Wall'' and engage the audience directly on some level- the classic screen distortion effect whenever he appears adds yet another layer of engagement as not only is the Slender Man interfering with the film's characters but with your own viewing of it. This was also seen as the plot of the recent horror movie ''Sinister'', where the main character finds videotapes of the villain, and later it reveals that the tapes literally *are* the villain.

The film ''The Last Horror Movie'' also taps into the idea of interactivity as a method of drawing in the audience- the set up of the movie is that a serial killer has recorded over the dvd you rented, creating a ''meta-horror'' movie fairly similar to the ARGs of the Slender Man found on Youtube.

The end of my horror trailer attempts to create a ''Leaning on the Fourth Wall'' moment, as the trailer ends with one of the possessed characters looking directly at the audience as the Slender Man stands in the background and the camera distorts wildly.

The Slender Man: Evaluative Blog

This is a blog I have made for my Media Studies A-Level with the intent to evaluate my production (a trailer, magazine cover, and poster) with respect to media techniques, technology, and genre conventions etc.