Empire magazine analysis

Very much unlike my film this poster features a product that is very heavily reliant on mise en scene to create verisimilitude as it is set back in ancient greek times. Therefore the opening photograph on this magazine is going to immediately connote themes such as ancient history and fighting, whilst also relating to similar films such as 300 and Jason and the Argonauts. Unlike Little White Lies, the background of the page consists of two images, not just plain colours. This adds the appearance of a full page and unlike LWL the spread isn't consistently symmetrical.

"Humans use patterns to help them deal with a chaotic world. As much as some humans enjoy chaos or the randomness of life, most are upset by it, and probably ancient humans even more, as they hadn't a clue what was going on." (Kunu Chuck 2010)

This explains why humans are drawn to symmetrically, because some are upset by the chaos and randomness of life. I like to think that also having a clean cut and balanced layout looks far more professionals, and this is reflected in LWL's target audience of independent film enthusiasts (more likely to be social grade c+, my target audience).

I believe that the images and background within the page causes an interesting contrast between the dark moody atmosphere of the greek soldier and the white of the ancient marble, this links in with Levi Strauss's binary opposition theory which states that "great contrast is created to draw the viewer in and create interest". This relates to this double page spread, as well as my film and possibly my poster, not necessarily because of my choice in colour scheme, but because I intend to feature my two main characters who have a considerable age gap between them.

Unlike Little White Lies, this article has a title, whereas LWL has a page before it explaining "In this section we review Shame". This isn't something that I would do because I only need to do a double page, so including a title to the article could give a better impression on the audience. The use of a large section of writing that leads into the main article is really interesting too, as it draws the viewer deeper into the main article, which is also relevant to the exaggerated first letter which does this also.

All in all, I intend to use some of these conventions that you would find in generic magazines, such as the main title of the review page, the image(s) of the actors within the film, exaggerated first letters, the name of the film and the use of large titles. Using these conventions, I feel that I will create an interesting, professional looking magazine review page that will be suitable and attract my target audience to see my film.

Empire Layout Analysis