ANCILLARY TEXT IDEAS & RESEARCH (2)

Film Magazine Review Page
For the second Ancillary text we will be doing a Film magazine review page for our Short Film.
To do this we will be conducting some research on film magazines and noting how the Professionals have designed their articles and what content they have included. We will then use this information collected to  make our own magazine review page.

I have decided to study three popular Film Magazines and combine all of the good things from these then apply it to our Film Magazine review page. Hopefully this will help to make it a good quality piece.

Research
Empire Magazine
Empire is a British film magazine published monthly by Bauer Consumer Media. From the first issue in July 1989, the magazine was edited by Barry McIlheney and published by Emap. Bauer purchased Emap Consumer Media in early 2008. It is the biggest selling film magazine in Britain, consistently outselling its nearest market rival Total Film and is also published in Australia, Turkey and Russia.

(An Example of an Empire magazine article)

Features of an Empire magazine article:

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

Feature articles have no borders but do have titles and page numbers. Less important articles have Borders.
All the pages are visually pleasing as there is lots to see, for instance different colour writing in different sizes with different fonts are used to bring life to the page. The big picture or lots of small pictures used helps with this too.

(An Example of an Empire magazine Article)
Overall there is lots of colour and it was interesting to read.


Total Film
Total Film, published by Future Publishing, is the United Kingdom's second best-selling film magazine. It offers film and DVD news, reviews, and features. The magazine was launched in 1997 and is published every four weeks. TF provides a range of features, from full-length interviews, with established and up-and-coming actors and directors, to major film previews.

(An example of a Total Film Magazine article)
Features of a Total Film Magazine:

• One quite smal picture
• Title in Bold
• Star rating
• Release Date
• Sentence that sums up movie in bold
• Small review of film
• Author of review in bold
• Certificate rating
• Running time

The articles are mostly a white background with black writing, the only colour really brought to the page is from the picture.

(An example of a Total Film Magazine article)
Occasionaly there is a full page picture with writing on top of it which i thought were good as normally these pictures are interesting and you can study the details more closely.
No borders are used really in any of their articles.

Filmstar
Filmstar is a British magazine devoted to films. Launched on 28 May 2009, Filmstar is the second magazine launched by Blackfish Publishing. It was published monthly and aimed at movie-goers aged 25 and over. Filmstar ended in October 2009 with issue 5.

(An example of a Filmstar Magazine article)
Features of a Filmstar Magazine article:

• One medium sized picture
• Name of Directors, Writers and Stars of the film alltogether
• Star Rating
• Certificate , Release date and Running Time alltogether
• 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 intergrated

(An example of a Filmstar Magazine article)
I felt that this Magazine did everything that a Film magazine should but was the least interesting out of them all which may have been why they stopped producing it.

I also decided to ask some people which magazine appealed to them the most out of the three. The majority said that they prefered the Empire Magazine as it was more Visually Appealing and the articles were more interesting to read compared to the other two magazines so i will keep this in mind when designing the magazine review page.

Summary

After studying these magazines i have come up with a list of techniques we will apply to our magazine review page:

• 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 coloured box
• Then a little sentence/synopsis of the movie, again, possibly in a coloured 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 doesnt bore the audience.