final magazine review

This is the final draft of my film review page. One page is a review of the film and the other page is an interview with the actor from the film, which are two common features within film magazines.

I stuck with the pretty main stream codes and conventions of film magazines like 'Empire' to achieve an authentic style and also to challenge what people see as a short film, which is usually specialist, by putting it in a more mainstream type of article so more people could access this short film. I stuck to conventions like using the pictures to dominate the pages, with bleeds to at least two edges. I also used add in’s like side boxes describing the pictures and also call outs articles to draw the readers interest to the page. Another feature I noticed in mainstream magazines is a movie quote incorporated into the page, which I tried to emulate in my by taking the films sort of slogan and putting it onto the image. The slogan in a question and this directly involves the reader, giving a sense of a bond by asking a question. I also used rhetorical questions in the articles and some well-used clichés, which I saw, were features of film review articles. Another added aspect with the link to the website at the end of the article creating another dimension to the review of the film, and people who are interested could gain a type of intertextuality and look into the world of short films. The page is a pretty stereotypical layout with a page header that is the movies title, immediately telling the reader what the article is about.

To challenge conventions I put the genre of short films, which usually leans towards niche audiences, into a mainstream format. However I also challenged a few magazine conventions like not using a 3-colour pallet, as I wanted the article to link to the films dual tone black and white.

Overall I feel this page works really well and looks as if it could be in a mainstream movie magazine. Its even has its own brand name 'Movie-Book'! The use of codes and conventions I have seen in other mainstream texts has helped me achieve the same effect, yet this review has subtle challenges to stereotypes of genre and colour use, to create cohesion between the film and the article which is surprisingly uncommon, aside from the images, in movie magazines.