Creating a magazine advert

Having created the digi-pak CD cover, we then went about creating the magazine advertisement. With the CD cover, we had chosen to give an authentic atmosphere with the use of silhouettes and a parchment background, however with our magazine advert we wanted to give a slightly more eerie appearance, and to visually create a clear link between the advert and the music video. I felt that a black background would create the eerie atmosphere, and would fit with the idea of hidden shadows that is consistent within our video. On Photoshop, I used the blend tool and faded images from the music video into the black background, which again emphasised the the concept of hiding in the shadows. After discussion, we felt that using the colour red on the name 'Kills' should be consistent in all of our advertising (as we used it on our CD cover). This both emphasises the horror genre of our music video, and also that 'Kills' is a word that is closely linked to danger, blood terror, all of which would be represented by the colour red.


However, we felt that this was not consistent with our CD cover, and did not have a strong enough link between the two, so as a group we began to re-evaluate our magazine advert. At first we started to play around with our original and tried to develop it to make it link more to our CD cover, and we resulted in examples such as this, however we all decided that it would be best to make a fresh start and take inspiration from our CD cover as again this was not clearly identified as advertising our CD cover as a product.

We began again, firstly considering what it was that we liked about our CD cover. We all liked the idea of the quotes in the background of our CD cover, and so thought that this would also look effective on our magazine advert too, which would create a clear link between the two promotional pieces. Also, having looked at some more example adverts, I felt that many of them actually included the CD front cover, as that is what it is promoting. I therefore suggested that we include the CD cover on the magazine advert. We created an advert which included the CD front cover on a black background with quotations from Alice in Wonderland on the black background. We also included star ratings as we had seen these on many magazine adverts, which made our advert look both professional and also the high rating marks made the product more desirable. However, Lily felt that there was still something missing, and had really liked the faded images and figures within our previous magazine adverts, so we experimented with putting some of the images from our music video into the background. We all liked this, and this created our final magazine advert, which we all thought was successful in promoting our CD.