The final product that I created was the magazine review for my short film. After doing some research, looking at existing film reviews. One convention I found, in the two main British film review was that they both had a main image on every review that always contained at least one of the main character/actor. Within mine I decided to have both of my main characters within the image to show their relationship within the movie, too real tell the audience that this movie is about conflict, a key convention in some genre of movie like action, which my film is. My research also told me that on a movie review the image is also ways a freeze frame from the movie not a stage shot like on the poster. So I decide to take the freeze frame from the end of my movie and use it as my image for my movie as it real shows the relationship and the conflict in the movie as he's holding a gun to his head.

Other key conventions that I discovered which are key to any film review is to have a verdict, credit information and star rating system. I located the verdict in the Bottom right side of the page so that it is that last thing they read, as we read from top left to bottom right, this means they should read the rest of the review. It also follows review convention, you never give your verdict first. I then decided to put the credit information below the verdict so that the key information was still present within the review but didn't draw to much focus away from the review.

Finally I located the star rating system below the title of the movie as it is convention but also to instantly tell the reader how good the film is but also to indicate to them what the review with focus on, telling them mostly positive things or negative things about the film. It also means it is near the middle of the page, so if the audience member is skimming the magazine they might see it out of the corner of their eye.

I had to look in depth at the text of the reviews to find key convention within the text. I found that next to a character’s name they would have the actors name in brackets. This is something I copied within my text to make sure audience knew who was playing each character. I also found that whenever they mentioned a movies name they would always put it in italics, so that it would stand out above the regular text, so they clear now what the movie is called.

A main convention amongst magazine review pages but also any magazine is to have the main text in black font on a white background to make it easy to read as these two colour don't blend with each other. I developed this convention by extending the white background onto the image so that the black text would not get blended in with the image.

One of the key magazines I looked at was 'total film' within their magazine they used a curve to predict the audience interest at certain points in the movie. I decided to copy this idea and convention from this magazine within my own, as I found it a really good way to inform the audience which points in the movie they should look out for if the review had persuaded them to go and see the movie.

I decided to challenge one of the key convention of a film review, a film review always uses the house style of the magazine not the movie. I decided to break this convention and use the house style front of my movie with the title of the movie on the review. So that the audience would instantly recognise that this is for my film and also may remind them if the poster if they had seen it before.

Codes and Conventions: Movie Review