Main Task- Magazine Research

I chose to create a magazine article as one of my ancillary tasks for my main production. By creating a magazine article I was able to incorporate aspects of advertising and marketing of my film as well as an insight into how I went about creating the film. I chose to study articles from magazines such as Empire and Total Film as they are renowned and popular film magazines, they also have a rage variety of articles that are written in different ways and based on different things.

Before planning my article I decided to look into existing and professional film articles to see what magazines most often wrote about films. I found that it was often commercial blockbuster films that had articles written about them as they acted as a form of advertisement. Many had interviews with the cast or the directors whereas others focused mainly on what the film was about. Most offered a review to go along with the article, they did this because not all magazine readers read all of the articles, so with a small review box the reader was able to get a small amount of information for the article, this means that it is more likely that every reader of the magazine will become aware of the film, without necessarily reading the article.

After looking into the content of articles I decided to look into how the articles were most often set out. Most of the articles I studied attracted readers with a large image to catch the reader’s attention. The image was often of the main character or an image taken form the film. This works by creating an interest around the film, by seeing what the film is like, an audience can decide if they would like to see the film or not. The article was set out in sections so it was easier to read, I noticed that large chunks of text were likely to put many readers off, so by spacing the text out it seemed as though there was less to read. Text was often broken up by images that were used to back up what was being said in the article itself.