Digital Graphics for Print | Production Log [Update 5]

For the magazine advertisement I took a different creative approach. I decided I would keep the video game aspect, so both of my adverts followed the same style, however instead of creating the original images in Photoshop, I would take pictures of actual people.

I dressed my friends Lucy and Corey up as Mario and Luigi respectively, and took them out to a field. I got them to do various poses to show the Mario brothers as 'brothers' and to show the connectivity that BBC Cult will offer.

Here are some of the photos I took:

I ended up deciding on the second one. This is because Lucy and Corey are interacting, which symbolises the slogan I was planning on using for BBC Cult "Bringing People Together".

Originally I had planned to just use the image on the field as my advertisement with the logo and slogan across the top and the bottom of the image. I then decided I would cut them out of the image and place them into a different background. The fact that they were interacting with each other essentially made them into one object, so it would have been easier for me to crop them out of the image.

Once they were cut out of the image, they looked like this:

Now that they were their own image with no background, I could manipulate the image and place it on top of another background.

I created a starburst-style background by taking a template from the internet and pasting in my own colours. I used the Magic Wand tool to select the area and then the Paint Bucket tool to past the image. I decided to use light blue and white for the pattern, as the bright colours help make the advert stand out.

I used the font 'Super Mario 256' for the text on the advertisement. I wrote "Video Games on BBC Cult" and "Bringing People Together" as separate text boxes so I could edit them individually. I used both the Free Transform tool and the Skew tool to manipulate the text to make it look over-dramatic and almost like a Japanese movie poster. This will attract the attention of people flicking through magazines, as the text takes up a lot of the screen.

I then added in the picture of Corey and Lucy and moved it around to fit alongside the text. I added 2 effects to the image "Bevel & Emboss" and "Drop Shadow". This helped the image stand out from the background and the text, making it the central focus of the advertisement.

I then just pasted in my already-created BBC Cult logo and the final document ended up looking like this: