Analysis Magazine- Total Film

This is a Star Trek edition of total film. The masthead of this magazine sticks to common conventions of magazines due to it being large and bold and taking around a third of the page, The reason this is good in terms of appealing to their target audience is because the total film masthead is very iconic and essentially works as a beacon to their fans allowing them to easily spot and distinguish this magazine from other competitors such as Empire. The masthead is also very simple and doesn’t lean to a particular type of social class or person this allows to magazine to appeal to the widest possible audience because it doesn’t particularly give off and themes,  this is mainly done by the colour as white is very neutral and does not naturally suggest a particular gender.

The main feature of the article is star trek and is the magazines main selling point for this addition. They try and sell this to the target by using the star vehicle on the front page. The placement of this vehicle addresses to the audience as the characters eyes are directly engaging the audience this should appeal to certain consumers that enjoy the work of the actor it is also noticeable that the actor is pulling an also most seductive pose suggesting the placement of the image is directed towards a female audience, this could be the magazine produces being clever as traditionally Star Trek is seen as a male dominant franchise and so by addressing this through use of image they connote that the film can also be enjoyed by female audiences, this is supported by the fact Star Trek is also seen as a “nerdy” franchise yet the magazine uses the word “coolest” underlined drawing attention to this attempting to counteract this “nerdy” reputation .

The magazine uses common puffs and pulls such as mentioning “exclusive” to try and draw in an audience. This would work because as Blumer and Katz uses and gratifications states audiences use certain media text for reasons, one of the most important reasons in this theory for magazine is information seeking and therefore by placing an “exclusive” audiences should feel the need to buy the magazine just to learn the “exclusive” information that magazine contains.

The colour of red is used subtly to perhaps suggests towards the genre or style of the magazines main feature Star Trek . Red tends to connote; danger,fear,lust and anger now when applied to a series such as Star Trek one commonly know for its Sci-Fi themes is also know for the occasional action scene due to this I believe they are using read to portray a sense of danger suggesting the film is a Action/Sci-FI. This appeals to an audience because it is commonly though of that men enjoy dangerous film such horrors and action adventures because of this the colour may have been chosen to try and attract an “adventurous” male audience as it would be thought that this type of consumer would get the most entertainment out of both the magazine and the film, this also applies to Blumer and Katz as entertainment is another significant fixture to why people seek media productions.

The typography of the magazine is bold, neutral and easy to read this has most likely been done to make it easier to see the text putting and emphasis on the stories included inside the issue. This must be what the producers thought was the main selling point apart from their Star Trek star vehicle, this also works well as star trek is know to be sci-fi yet one of the main stories they emphasize is based on comedy films, meaning the magazine is trying to reach out to consumers that like the comedy genre as well as sci-fi/adventure this widens the magazines audience base.