Ancillary Texts Ideas and Research 2

The second Ancillary Task that me and Conor are going to create is a magazine review article on our film. This will mean having to design the article and then making up the context to go into the article. How me and Conor will word our article will be based on what our audience feedback has told us about our film, and we must try not to be biased towards our film, but instead use idead put forward from our audience into how they felt about our film.

Research Into Film Magazine Reviews:
Me and Conor have bought a few film magazines which we have full looked at, and analyzed the review sections. The review sections usually cover a large part of the the film magazine, and will vary in size, if the film is a big hit feature film, its review will obviously be much larger and be given more space in the magazine. This can be anything from a page to a two page spread. The two magazines that me and Conor have looked into are Empire, Total Film and Filmstar.

Empire Magazine: 
Empire is a fantastic magazine in my personal opinion and after reading a few issues for this research, I am now certain it will become a more regular buy for me. The magazine has a good range of color and images to attract its reader, and even in the not so colorful review pages, the layout is much easier to read than some over magazines I have looked into.

The Review:
I have looked at many of the reviews in the Empire magazine and noticed that they use a style which is visually pleasing to the reader to draw them into reading the review. A feature review will usually have one massive picture as the background with the font in a box in-front of the picture. A smaller review will have a border and be surrounded by many other reviews. The magazine uses lots of different fonts and colors to brighten up and make the review more interesting.

Main Features of a Empire Review:

• A Big Picture
• Brief Synopsis/ Technical Details
• One Big Quote 
• Final Verdict at the End
• Star Rating

Total Film Magazine: 
Total Film is the second magazine that I looked at and although in my opinion not as good as Empire, this magazine is still an excellent read with some interesting articles looking at both current and past media. The layout of the review page in this magazine id very similar to empire, but it tends to squish a few more reviews into each page which in a personal opinion makes it hard to read and not as appealing.

The Review:
I have looked at many different reviews in Total Film.  The review page in the Total Film magazine is not as interesting visually as the Empire magazine, and it is generally a black font, white background scenario. The article relies on images to incorporate color into it, however on some more featured articles

Main Features of a Total Film Review:

• One Quite Small Picture
• Title in Bold
• Star Rating
• Release Date
• Sentence that Sums up Movie in Bold
• Small Review 
• Aurthur or Review in Bold
• Certificate Rating
• Running Time

Filmstar Magazine:
Filmstar Magazine is not as popular as the other two films magazines I have rated, but is still a nice example of how a review should be set out and conducted. I like the way in which the magazine uses a lot of large sized images throughout, I think this is a very visually pleasing magazine.

The Review:
I think that the magazine manages to complete all the basics needed for a good review, and does have some influential things to say, but the review is simply not as interesting or visually pleasing as the other two magazines I reviewed, however the different set up style must be taken into account when designing my own.

Main Features of a Filmstar Review:

• One Medium Sized Picture.
• Name of Directors, Writers and Stars of the film Altogether.
• Star Rating.
• Certificate , Release date and Running Time Altogether.
• Sentence that Sums up Film.
• Positives and Negatives plus Brief Synopsis.
• Small fact about the movie in a box in the middle shaped like a post-it note.
• Bold Writing at Starts of Paragraphs.
• A black line border is used with the title of the section integrated.

Summary of Codes and Conventions:
 By incorporating all the ideas and techniques from the three magazines I have reviewed and combining this with my own knowledge, I have written up my conclusion of codes and conventions of a magazine article review, and here is how I will incorporate these into my review:

• We will use quite a large picture somewhere on the page to interest the audience
• The title should be Large and in bold but also maybe white/black in a colored box
• Then a little sentence/synopsis of the movie, again, possibly in a colored box with white/black writing underneath the title.
• Synopsis of the film, good points, bad points and overall opinion.
• Name of directors, writers, certificate rating and release date in a box somewhere on the page
• Star Rating, this could be close to the directors box(see above bullet point)
• The Crucial thing is to keep the page looking interesting and visually pleasing so it doesn't bore the audience.

Gathering Audience Feedback:
We asked for the opinion from our target audience which would be the best review magazine to use as an influence of our own review. They chose the 'Empire' magazine because it was the most visually pleasing, and they said it would be the review they were most likely to pick up and read.
The reason why we went to our target audience to pick up feedback is, we would most like our target audience to read the review in the hope to draw them into watching our short film.

First Draft:
Here is our first attempt at the film magazine. This idea was thrown out because it simply did not look real enough and did not look like it was from inside a magazine. After looking into the film reviews again, we were able to learn from the mistakes made in this draft: