Plan for Magazine

Soapy Scene

This is soap magazine I created and named, 'Soapy Scene', to practice with different programs before creating our final soap opera magazine.  Whilst making this I experimented in Photoshop, Paint and finally used Microsoft Publisher to put it all together.  I wasn't sure how it would turn out in Publisher - I thought we might need to use a more specialized program for a more professional look, but I like the result and the layout and will use it for our final magazine.  It also follows important conventions of a soap magazine such as the left third rule - where all the selling points of the magazine have to be situated in the left third of the cover (barcode, title, price, date and sometimes an issue number) to make it easy for the buyer to see these pieces of information when displayed on a shelf where the rest of the magazine would be covered by another magazine.  It uses bright, eye-catching colours and images to grab the buyers' attention, various stories from multiple soap operas (albeit fake soap operas for the purpose of this practice magazine cover) and bold, legible fonts.

Magazine Plan for Cherry Gardens


This is the design I came up with specifically for our soap opera 'Cherry Gardens' with a possible main story we could use and how we could lay it out.  The main story involves Marris Morris (the character our trailer and first episode will revolve around) and 2 stereotypically troublesome teenagers, Dan and Kirk.  Marris is in the middle, trapped by Dan and Kirk, unable to escape, portraying the conflicting and constrictive opinions and relationships between youths and mature/elderly people in society today.  Therefore this story is verisimilitude to everyday life and conventional of soap opera storylines.  The verbal message of 'Behind YOU...' connotes that the story is dark and suggests a cyclical nature (when in pantomimes the character's realisation of the threat is long drawn out) where the characters never reach an agreement and, just when you think it's over, the story continues.