Style Conventions of Little White Lies

Style Conventions of Little White Lies

Hyperlink to Little White Lies Website: http://www.littlewhitelies.co.uk

Little White Lies tends to follow a certain paragraph structure within all of it's review to conform to it's consistent house style. An image tends to scale the top of the review justified along each column. This use of justification helps to converge to the stylistic appearance of the reviews and adds a continuity to them all. The title of the film then follows below in a bold and simplistic font, this is centred and is likely to only fill 1-2 thirds of the page width. Below this in italics are a release date and credits such as 'Directed by' followed by the name of the - in this example director - in a bold and all capitalised font.

Below is where the substance of the review is positioned, which is commonly separated into 3 columns and 7 paragraphs. The main separation of segments within the paragraphs are as follows;

1. Context - this paragraph deals with the contextual issues of the film such as information about the director and perhaps previous films, along with historical and cultural events in relation or as inspiration for the film.
2. Summary information about protagonist(s) and key players - this paragraph looks at traits of characters and perhaps even representation of them in certain areas. Key aspects of the film and featured characters also form the bulk of this paragraph along with an evaluation of each actor as well as character performance. 

The following sections tend to be the longest section of the review.

3. Key themes, issues and plot - being within the core of the review, this paragraph plays a major role in the reviewing of the film. Therefore, it gives a complete (yet condensed!) overview of, essentially, what the film is all about. This does not reveal any key information of the ending or aspects which aren't supposed to be revealed.

4. Narrative devices - this paragraph sums up the overall narration within the film and also evaluates them to give a full review.

5. Use and adaptation of genre conventions - this paragraph deals with genre and also evaluates it. In our case, you could expect to see some references to theorists such as David Buckingham, Steve Neale and Rick Altman.

6. Reviewer's experience of the film - within this paragraph will be some information on the experience of the reviewer's who are most likely members of Little White Lies' target audience.

7. Summary evaluation - this isn't so much a paragraph but rather a conclusive sentence, this will be placed at the end of the last paragraph and will be evaluative and informative to provide a final point reviewing the entire film as an overview.

The final column comes to an end about half way down the length of the other two. This is done in order to leave room for the final rating table. The table is made up into three sub-sections entitled 'ANTICIPATION', 'ENJOYMENT' and 'IN RETROSPECT' and will be graded from 1 - 5 with 1 being the worst and 5 the best. These sub-sections will also include a sentence or two giving reasoning for the rating and are usually dysphemistic and to-the-point.

Here is an example from the digital version of the magazine
regarding the newly released film 'Black Sea'.

Towards the bottom centre of the page in a very small font is a page number which always consists of three digits whether the number of the page be 001, or 222. This, again, adds to the continuity of the visuals and house conventions used throughout the magazine series.