Ancillary Task 1: Magazine Review

One of the requirements for our A2 course is to make a magazine review to accompany our film.

When we make our magazine review, we will need to learn how to use Quark Xpress, a programme that we will use for it. After following a tutorial that Mr Hood has posted, we all made our own product, in practise for when we have to make our final article. We had a feedback session, and were given improvements by the rest of the class. Some of my improvements to be made were that my text columns were not all precisely equal, and my photo needed to be more central. This below is my final practise product, with improvements. The title of the film could do with being a lot clearer, and I feel it looks like it's lacking colour and there's too much text. Below the draft is the production tutorial that I followed.

My practice magazine review

In preparation for making the ancillary task, we researched existing magazine reviews for inspiration, and analysing them will help us to get a clear vision of how ours should look. Below is a deconstruction of existing articles.

Now that we've looked at some real reviews, we are ready to make our own. Using Quark Xpress - what we used previously for practise - we created our first draft. This is it below.

Draft film review

After this we recieved feedback from our target audience. They gave us constructive feedback, and this was written down by me so that I knew what improvements to make. These improvements included:

• Too much spacing between the title of the film and the rest of the text.  Also too much spacing around the area of the 'verdict'. 
• The runaround is not spaced out enough.
• The line under the 'Dave' needs to be changed from blah blah blah.
• The framing of the photo could be changed to make 'Dave' more of the focus. The 'InCinemas' shouldn't have a line in the middle of it, also.

Out of 10, the average rating that they gave was 6. Because of the feedback, we were able to make improvements, and this is our final draft below.

Final draft of the magazine review

Some other things that I changed was the spacing of the lines. I made them all the same length to make it look more visually appealing. I also added some text at the bottom to make it more realistic to an actual magazine review.