Little White Lies Research - Harrison

Little White Lies is a British independent movie that comes out bi-monthly (once every two months), the magazine contains writing, brilliant illustrations and photography which is directly related to recently released films, for example their most recent copy was based on Quentin Tarantino's new film called "Django Unchained", which is absolutely brilliant. The magazine is published by London-based creative agency The Church of London, who also publish Huck Magazine. Below is the front cover of the most recent edition from Little White Lies, containing an awesome piece of artwork created by one of the Little White Lies artists.

Their first issue was released in March/April 2005 and was based on the film "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou" which is a fairly successful comedy-drama film that was released in 2004. The LWLies magazines focuses on bringing short and entertaining reviews to film enthusiasts, the target audience is 18 - 30 year olds, but through market analysis it has been shown that the most common age for a fan of LWLies is 24.

The magazine is split into 6 chapters: the lead review, an editorial introduction, a series of articles inspired by the feature film, theatrical reviews, the Back section and future releases. To give the films a final score the three categories that LWLies use are Anticipation, Enjoyment and In Retrospect which are scored out of 5 and have a small sentence to go with them, this has proved to be an effective way to review a film as many LWLies readers say that this is one of the main factors that influences them to either see a film or avoid it.

The main design of the LWLies magazine is set on a template that is the same throughout all of the magazines, however they are adapted to the feature film - for example in the Django Unchained edition they used a lot of chains as paragraph breakers and headers as Django Unchained is very focused on the slave trade, I like this about the magazine as even though it's the same layout every release, it's stylised to fit with the feature film.

On the main review page they are always the same, with the same font and template all the way down to font size, dimensions and alignment. Below is one that they have done on the film "Holy Motors" and next to it is one I have created in InDesign to replicate and write our review with, obviously I am going to use a still from our film and not a photo from our group last year.

Mine is fully customisable and can be easily edited. The default template for LWLies is a still from the movie it is reviewing as the header followed by the title of the film which is centred and in bold, underneath this is the Directors name, who the film stars and then when it's being released. This is then followed by a short and concise review which normally lasts about 500-550 words and is started by an uppercase letter which is bold and is 3 lines deep. It is ended by 3 ratings out of 5 which rounds of the review nicely.

This is how we are going to be formatting our review and then tailoring it to our short film.