Film Review questions

Q1) why you chose the magazine?

I choose to re-create Empire magazines mainly because of their well known reputation reviewing many A class films from all over the world. Empire has a huge fan base who follow their reviews and buy their magazines. I believe having a feature in the magazine we could compete with the likes of sold cinema films and some how is able to promote our filming alongside the biggest and the best.

From looking at Empires review pages, I've analysed a house style and layout which I can recreate for my own film reviews appearance in Empire magazine.

The set and layout involves the 'main feature' which is usually a blockbuster status film, with 3 or 4 smaller film reviews below. With an image for each provides easy relation for readers.
The review itself is in-depth, referring to common film knowledge and lingo, while making comparisons to similar films or stories. The language is clearly targeted at film enthusiasts and those with interest in the industry, which is what I'll aim to do in my own review, perhaps by using film terms and expressing an understanding myself through the review.

This type of reviewing style I feel suits our film better, with it being a more visual and representing independent film. Empire review these based on themes, most reviews with the main feature at the top, and the others below are linked by the same or similar genres and themes.

Q2) Some decisions you made about text, image, layout and why?

Whilst planning out my film review I had to keep the layout as realistic as possible and to look closely at the original spread from Empire magazine, this meant I had to make sure the right pictures were chosen to place within the review in order to capture the reader’s eyes.

The layout was tricky to recreate because of the space available on the page, the font size had to be large enough to read but to also match the rest of the review, The way I worked around this was to experiment with the different layout options and also font sizes. As a result of doing so, this meant my text had to be very specific simply because I didn’t have much space to play with; it was essential I was as descriptive and an analytical as possible in the little space I had.

One decision I made was whether to change my page set-up to landscape instead of portrait. I was going to do this so more text could fit on the page. This wasn’t practical because the film review from Empire magazine was portrait-again going back to the realism factor it wouldn’t look exactly identical.

Q3) Final strengths and weaknesses of your review

My review looks realistic and a lot like the real Empire article, I believe I blended the text and sizes together well and als

o deeply thought about the text to include within the review, another strength was my idea to use a review which included other film reviews, this added to the realism effect.

A weakness was not being able to include the actual font style as the real article, i experimented with many variations but had to settle for one similar, this can only be made clear if the viewer looks long and hard at the slight differences and variations between both reviews real and fake.