Jide's Textual Analysis of A Film Magazine (Harry Potter)

In this essay I aim to provide a textual analysis of the front cover for the Empire magazine.

Denotation: The magazine consists of a colour photograph showing many actors. Some are looking straight at the camera others are looking away, I can tell that the camera shot was a mid long shot for the main actor in front but for the others a close up camera shot was taken. It also shows that the photos were taken with a high quality camera and then edited with Photoshop to put the broken glass effect on the magazine.   Behind the picture we can see the masthead Empire and the barcode is located at the bottom of the magazine.

Masthead: Empire is defiantly one of the most known film magazines and industries known in England. The sign Empire is written in a non-serif style as the letters seem quite big, spaces out and they are not curved or have like a little feet at the bottom. I would also say that Empire followed the convention of having the masthead behind the cover artist as most media magazines follow the convention of having the masthead at the back.

The cover photograph’s are of Harry Potter and the other stars in the famous ‘’Harry Potter’’ movies this could suggest that Harry Potter was deliberately placed as the big picture on the magazine because most people would see harry potter as the main character and the others are support characters. Harry is posed with his wand sticking out which means when people especially children walk past and see the magazine they will be able to tell its Harry Potter straight away by the wand being in his hand and the child being able to remember straight away that Harry Potter uses a wand.

The style of the photograph is very much in fashion of the 21^st century as we are moving into a era of were most children movies are supposed to have dreamlike and surreal animations also the use of 3D is more and more becoming accepted and used in the movie industry.

There are many cover lines on the magazine front cover but the main cover line is ‘’Friendships shatter, Evil unites, Potter 7, The End Begins’’ This is making reference to the latest Harry Potter film called ‘’Harry Potter and the deathly hallows’’ which is said to be author J.K Rowling’s finale on the worldwide hit book. The use of the phrase ‘’friendship shatters’’ has a double meaning and could be said to be a pun as on the front cover of the magazine it shows shattered glass which links directly to the phrase ‘’shattered’’ and also the use of all the other characters looking as if they are all against each other is also a play on the phrase ‘’friendship shatters’’.

As it seems the magazine front cover is only focused on Harry Potter but there are some other cover lines such as writing about other heroes such as ‘’The Avengers, Green Lantern and Pegg and Frost’’ this is suggesting that there could be other heroes who are even better than Harry Potter and if you are one of those people who are not really interested in Harry Potter then there could be other heroes which you may find interesting in the Empire magazine.

Also at the top of the magazine front cover it says ‘’our best preview yet’’ which could convey that in a bid to boost sales they are trying to convince people that this is their best ever magazine that they have made to talk about film previews as out of the whole sentence the two words ‘’preview issue’’  are highlighted. It could also be placed on the top deliberately as when people look at a magazine they mostly always look at the brand name to know whether the brand is a local, national or globally known magazine which may always influence their decision to purchase a magazine.

There is also a cover line talking about legendary directors such as ‘’ Carpenters, Dante & Landis and Triple-Bill’’ this could suggest that Empire are trying sway the people who are interested in film directors views and thoughts into purchasing this magazine.

I would finally like to point out that the target audience for this would be aimed at children from at least aged 5- 18 as they will most likely be the people to be interested in  the genre of Sci-Fi and the fantasy side of films. I justify this because most people aged older will be interested in films of a rating of 18 such as Saw, The House Of Wax etc, parents would watch this Sci-Fi but only as they will be bringing their sons or daughters to watch the films.