Beginning the Film Review

Recently, I have started creating my film review. As mentioned previously, this film review needs to be of a similar layout/use of language as a real film magazine. Many of my class mates have based their layouts on either Sight and Sound or Empire magazine, although I have chosen to base mine on the magazine Little White Lies. I chose to do this for a number of reasons. A main point was that I generally just liked the layout, but another stemmed from the idea that my film is much more likely to feature in a magazine of this sort than perhaps others such as Empire. Whilst analysing some Little White Lies magazine reviews compared with some from Empire, I found that as a whole, and although still reviewing hollywood films, Little White Lies were more likely to review short films, and lower budget 'Art House' films - which I feel my film is much more alike.

My film review so far and an example of a 'film review' in Little White Lies magazine

To produce my film review, I have been using a program called 'In Design', which allows for a conventional magazine layout to be created (such as columns etc). Through this I was able to add in three texts boxes in vertical column format (Little White Lies uses a three column layout). I was then able to add indivdual textboxes at other angles in order to write the director, actors and release date in a very similar format to LWL, being positioned centeral, and at the top of the page, with certain letters in italics, bold or capitalised. I did the same in the bottom right hand corner of the page were LWL reviews had their 'verdict'. This is three different 'out-of-five' scores for the film in terms of anticipation, enjoyment and inreterospect. I tried to make these scores not significantly unrealistic through giving it two 4's and a 5! The 'Times New Roman' font is similar to that used in LWL magazine although I am yet to experiment with other fonts which may be more similar.

I also needed to add a key image. Reviews in LWL magazine tend to just have one image, at the top of the page, acting almost like a header. These tend to have rounded corners, which is something I liked. For the main image, I used the photographed version of the sketch used in my poster, which I feel somes up the theme of my film well - awkwardness, as well as displaying the actors clearly. I wanted to make the image look a little more old fashioned due to the relitively ambiguous time of the film. To do this I used Photoshop to add a 'filter' and to make the image brighter and more saturated. Also whilst I was in Photoshop, I rounded the corners of the image, through adding a layer in a 'rounded corner rectangle' shape and deleting the background (the sharp corners).

Still to do on the film review:

• The title
• Font for the title
• Font for the main body of text (and enlarged first letter)
• Write actual review
• Write comments under anticipation, enjoyment, in retrospect
• 'Reviews' down the side of the page (as in LWL)
• Page number at bottom of page as in format '059' (as in LWL)