Prop Newspapers and Magazines

Steven J. Weller has posted a great little article on creating prop newspapers and magazines over at the IndyMogul forums. It's aimed at low budget filmmakers, but the techniques are equally applicable to tabletop and live action gaming.

I like to put just the masthead on a single sheet of legal paper, and do the rest of text separately. You're going to paste up the newspaper on a 24" x 36" sheet of paper or poster board, a piece at a time. Make your own headlines, cut columns of text from a real newspaper (or create them yourself if you need something that can be read in a close-up), add black and white photos that you've screen-printed in your favorite graphics program, and take the whole paste-up into your local copy shop. Make an oversized copy onto the newsprint, cut it to size, wrap it around a real newspaper, and you're ready to shoot!

For the back page, I like to use a full page of classified ads or a stock market page, instead of building it all from scratch. No one's ever likely to see much of it, so it just needs to be a page of ND print. You might also use a full-page ad for a car dealership, as they're common in that position - just be sure to change the name of the dealership. There's no need to print anything on the opposite side of the fake front page, and a good reason not to - there's no way for the image to bleed through to the front if there's no image there to begin with. Plus, it only costs half as much to print the sheet on one side, and there's no issue with registration between the two sides.