Fiction Adaptation: WW1 Newspaper Development

What am I doing for my WW1 Newspaper Prop?

For part of my film, I need to find a WW1 newspaper headline which is about the deaths of soldiers throughout the war. This is mainly used to indicate to the female character that her husband has been killed at war (as I plan to have the newspaper to have his face on the front page) thus allowing the rest of my story to flow.

Newspaper Example

Originally, I begun researching to find decent newspaper articles which relate to death where I could potentially photoshop my male character to be one of the soldiers killed. Below is an example of what the newspaper could be:

The title is instantly recognisable to the death of soldiers ("Our fallen heroes") which initially will allow the audience to learn that the husband has killed at war, once they see his face amongst the others on the paper. This could be enhanced via the camera where I could then pan the soldiers who have been killed and finish on the soldier who is the female character's husband.

Nonetheless, this could be problematic in terms of the picture fitting in with the rest of the newspaper. If the picture doesn't suit the rest of the paper, then the whole drama which has built up may've been lost as it doesn't look entirely realistic.

Therefore, I've decided that I'm going to create my own newspaper. This will allow me to show exactly what I want the audience to see instead of adapting an original newspaper purely so that it fits in with my narrative. This will be a bit of a challenge however below is some research which I've done in terms of designing the newspaper itself.

After I have designed the newspaper, I will then get some paper and cover it in teabag juice so it gives the paper its authentic 'brown' and 'old' feel, as well as slightly crinkling the paper to add to this. The newspaper design could then be printed on this paper, thus creating the headline front page of the paper which I will use for my story. To make it look more like a newspaper, I could make more bits of paper the same colour and authentic look and simply put it underneath or inside the headline news.

So how can I create a World War 1 Newspaper?

The Font

I begun researching online to see which are the typical fonts used for WW1 newspaper articles. Of course, this would be complex to define a conventional WW1 font as they didn't have computers in the first world war, meaning the fonts wouldn't have a typical template or name (it would be dependent on the graphic designer's style).

However I came across a website called '100types' which is basically a website showing 100 of the most significant fonts in history (ranging from the 1600s to 2000). This therefore is very helpful as it'll tell me which the most common fonts were during the war.

Below is the timeline from 1830 to 1937. You can see that around the first war (1914 to 1918), the fonts which are evident are:

    - Souvenir
    - ATF Garamond
    - Johnston's Railway Sans

The Design

Example of the newspaper template
I will be using

In terms of design, I am not going to spend too much time on this as this will literally only be in my film for no longer than 10 seconds, meaning it would be relatively pointless to spend hours on it. Therefore I have decided to follow the same design as the news paper example I gave above - simply have little writing and instead have more images.

In fact, my newspaper could potentially be an 'edit' of the example - I plan to only change the name of the newspaper to something more iconic (such as 'The Daily Mirror') as well as potentially making the title seem more obvious i.e. making it bigger or bolder. I will most likely keep the same images of the soldiers dependent on whether they are as a similar quality as the image which I will be adding. I may also change some of the smaller writing into something more dramatic as well as saying how these soldiers may've been killed. This may need to be a bigger font that it already is as it is currently quite small and the audience may not be able to read it as quick.

What image of the male character will I use?

As the whole purpose of this newspaper is to show the death of the female's husband, the image will need to be of the husband dressed in his soldier outfit - similar to all of the images shown in the newspaper above. Therefore I will need to take a picture of him before hand and add it into the paper, of course obeying to the paper's conventions e.g. monochrome, medium shot, etc.

My Edited and Adapted Newspaper Headline

After editing the example above, I have adapted the front page of the newspaper to suit my film, which you can see below. All I have done is change the headline title and left a space where I will be adding in an image of my male character. This will be added after the first day of shooting, where I will take a picture then adapt it to suit the newspaper.

Screenshot of edited headline on Adobe Photoshop