Cinefex Magazine

• Cinefex – American Edition
• Format – Magazine
• Frequency – 6 x Per Year
• Subscription Period – 1 Year

Cinefex  launched in 1980, is a bimonthly journal covering visual effects in the movies. Each issue is handsomely produced, and features lengthy, detailed articles that describe the creative and technical processes behind current films, the information drawn from interviews with the effects artists and technicians involved. Each issue also features many behind-the-scenes photographs illustrating the progression of visual effects shots – from previsualization to final – as well as the execution of miniatures, pyrotechnics, makeup and other related effects.

Cinefex was made available for the iPad, enabling users to purchase digital copies of back issues of the magazine. The magazine was founded by Don Shay, who alone wrote and produced the first issue, which covered the effects work in the films Alien and Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Earlier, Shay had written extensively on the stop-motion effects work in the original 1933 film King Kong, published in the British publication Focus on Film, and had authored a definitive piece on the effects in Close Encounters of the Third Kind for the magazine Cinefantastique.

A defining characteristic of Cinefex is its unusual 8”x9” configuration, a format Shay chose to enable him to reproduce film frames in a format similar to their original film aspect ratio. The magazine was entirely reader-supported for its first ten years. In 1990, advertising director Bill Lindsay launched an advertising program that enabled Shay to hire editor Jody Duncan, the publication’s head writer for several years, and later, associate editor Joe Fordham. In late 2015, as the quarterly magazine transitioned into bimonthly publication, Cinefex blog editor Graham Edwards joined the team as a full-time writer.