Conventions Of A Magazine Spread

I have done some research into the conventions of a magazine review page spead of a short film, i looked at different film magazines such as EPIC, TotalFilm, Empire, from looking at these film magazines i have discovered that most film reviews take a double page spread and have plenty of sneak peak pictures of whats in the film to grab your attention, they also use bright colours in the background as a form of eye catcher and because of this you are more likely to read this page, they often have interviews of some form with actors, directors etc, we have decided to use this idea in ours but have tweaked it and our going to do the interview from the perspective of one of the films characters and not the actor playing the character, the magazine reviews often have long paragraphs with lots of information etc, but we have decided to use short paragaphs with different information but not giving to much away so that the reader will have to come see the film.

Audience Research

we decided to do a questionaire as our target research, alex and i both devised the questions and set out and asked different sets of people around our school and people within the age bracket of 15 to 18 as this is our decided target audience, we decieded on 18 questions, here are the questions we wrote and some of the responses we got:

1) Age ?

17,17,17,17

2) Do you watch short films ?

yes,no,no,occasionally

3) If not why ?

NA,too simple,doesnt hold interest,NA

4) What genre do you prefer ?

romcom,thriller,thriller/comedy,animated

5) What would you like to see in a short film ?

jokes,complex storyline,action,mature jokes

6) How many characters do you think it needs ?

6,2,2,3

7) How long do you think a short film should last ?

10 mins,20 mins,5 mins,5 mins

8) Where would you watch a short film ?

before a movie,internet,internet,after a movie

9) Where do you think it should be advertised ?

posters,internet,social network sites,cinema adverts

10) Where should the location be set ?

city,village,city,random

11) Is it more effective to film at night ?

no,no,dusk,yes

12) What part of the year should the film be set ?

autumn,autumn,winter,summer

13) What period of time should it be set in ?

modern,modern,modern,modern

14) How much would you pay to see it ?

£5,£2,£0,£5

15) Who would you go see the film with ?

girlfriend,friend,friend,friend

16) Why would you go see a short film ?

new experience,boredom,new cultural experience, entertaining

17) What type of viewer would watch this ?

teens,teens,teens,teens/kids

18) How should we promote this ?

bus posters,web advertising,magazine review,radio adverts

With the information we have gathered we will use this to plan our film and advertising schemes and hopefully make a film that our audience will enjoy and want to watch.

Weekly Progress

so far over the past week we have done our genre research, short film research and we have delegated tasks between us, we have decided on the genre of our film and have made a basic design of what our film is going to be about, we have learnt about the conventions and know now how to apply them to our film, after writing a basic script and making a storyboard we will start to film in the next few weeks.

Post Modernism

post modernism is the evolution of modernism, modernism was split into many different form such romantacism,cubism etc and made people choose which one they liked and as soon as one was finished people would have to move onto the next regardless if they liked it just to be part of the social norm, post modernism started in the sixties and broke convention as people were allowed to like whatever they wanted, most modern singers, actors, directors try to break convention and often reffered to as post modern as this is associated with people trying to be new and not fit in with everyone, this makes for a more free aproach to cinema as now there are mutiple genres for people to enjoy based on there own taste, whereas before the sixties it would be often comedy or drama.

Task Management

Alex's Tasks:

• Poster design and research
• Storyboard
• searching for locations of films
• Questionaire

Lewis' Tasks:

• Magazine spread Design and Research
• genre research
• Script
• Questionaire

Genre Research

We wacthed the film Colin which was a thriller/ horror, we were given this to watch as we wanted to do a thriller based film but because both me and alex made a thriller last year we decieded to take a new direction and try something more within the conventions of a short film so we have decieded upon a drama/ comedy film, watching colin did however make us decide to use many short length clips as the clips in this film seemed quite long and did not work so well, we also decided to make it a colour film this year as we tried black and white before and didnt think it would work with this genre.