Film Review Progress

As well as creating a poster for our short film, for the other ancillary task we have to create a magazine review of our film.

I have arranged the layout for our film review. I have adopted an ‘Empire’ review style, by separating the text into the headings: ‘Plot’, ‘Review’ and ‘Verdict’. I felt this was a nice way to divide up the review and interesting and easy for readers to follow. Additionally, if the reader is skimming through the magazine quickly and is only interested in the verdict, they can easily pinpoint and read just that section.

I decided to include a fact file box as well, as it informs the readers about important details to do with the film, including rating, running time and actors involved.

The text of the review is not completed yet, as we have not actually finished editing our film, so as it is not finished, a full review of it cannot be made. However, I have inputted sentence starters and given the idea about topics which I wish to cover in the actual review. I also want to include a quote as well, as this is a typical convention of magazine style film reviews.

I have inserted some pictures from our film edit to our magazine review, one of Lucas and Grace together and one of Lucas in the successful life at his mansion. Not only do these pictures reflect the two different narratives of our film, they also show the different locations and characters involved within our film too. We also hope to include a picture of Lucas at the train station, as that is an essential setting within our short film.

At first we had just a plain white background and were going to choose another colour at a later stage. Yet after further research into magazine film reviews, we noticed how a lot of them actually incorporate a photo from the film as the background picture and we thought that would be a nice feature for our review too.

We chose the photo of Lucas in the successful life; however we may change this at a later stage to a photo of Lucas at the train station. Nevertheless, we feel with a photo set as the background, our review looks much more realistic.

First film review draft

Second film review draft



Film Review Inspiration

I have previously researched The Guardian and Empire film reviews, making note of the structures, layouts and audiences, so I make sure I create the right style of review for our short film.

We feel Empire would be the right magazine for our review as it is read by the same demograph as those who would watch our film (18-35) and due to being a worldwide company, it can help with the promotion of our film.

As we can see with the ‘Inception’ review from Empire Online, they arrange it with a Plot, Review and Verdict structure, which we feel is a good way to layout our review. We believe it is easy for readers to follow as this way they can choose to read only certain sections if they wish to do so.  

Empire Online - Plot, Review and Verdict structure

Regarding the magazine versions of Empire, they still employ the same structure as the online versions. The review below incorporate still images from the film which is something we intend to do, as it will give the reader an insight into our short film and the locations and actors involved.

Empire Magazine Review - Use of still image from film

Some film reviews, for example the one below, has a still image from the film, set as the background of the review page with the text overlapping, which I feel is a nice feature. This review also includes other images as well, proving to be an interesting layout.

Empire Magazine Review - image set as background

Although we are adopting an Empire style film review, I did look at The Guardian film reviews, as they too are read by a wide audience, albeit it only British. The feature which The Guardian employed which we liked was the fact file box, as shown in the review of ‘The King’s Speech’ below.

The Guardian Review - Fact File box

Ancillary Task: Film Review research

As I am creating one of our ancillary tasks; the film review, I have researched film reviews from other publications, in order to help me adopt the correct style of writing for the review of our short film.

I chose to look in detail at two different publications: Empire Magazine and The Guardian’s film reviews, to give me ideas on the best way to approach our film review. When reading reviews by these publications, I noticed how they both apply a different format and style of writing to their reviews and there were certain features of both which I want to incorporate within our film review.

Empire is the world’s leading movie magazine and it sets out its reviews in three sections: Plot, Review and Verdict, something which I felt was an interesting arrangement and easy for the audience to follow and read. The Guardian, on the other hand, does not have a set structure and its layout is much more like a newspaper article, although it does incorporate a fact file box, stating interesting facts about the film it is reviewing. It should be taken into consideration how Empire and The Guardian are created for two very different audiences, hence why there are differences within their writing styles and layouts. The Guardian is more likely to appeal to the middle class and only to a British audience, as is a British newspaper, whereas Empire is a much more global magazine, for a younger audience than The Guardian’s. 

As our film has the target audience of 18-35 year olds, we need to keep that in mind when creating our film review. We believe that Empire Magazine would be a good place for our film review to be published, as it would help to promote our film worldwide and we suppose our demograph are more likely to read that type of magazine. Additionally, as we consider that our film will appeal to women more than men due to the fact it is a drama and relates to emotions and making choices, traits more associated with females; then a women’s magazine would also be a good place for us to publish our review as this would directly reach our intended demograph.

Hopefully we will create a film review that will interest and persuade our demograph into choosing to watch our short film.