When I made my magazine page, I did so on a school day where I had most of my free periods and had the opportunity to stay after school to get it finished. Therefore even though my production commentary has been split across two posts, I still had to make this in one day.
The first stage, in my opinion, was to get all of my chosen images onto one Photoshop file. I opened them in separate documents and then dragged the images onto one layered file, where I could then adjust their sizes and make them adhere to the layout I wanted. Because each image was taken from a different source they all had different dimensions, hence why in the screenshot above the two shots differ in scale rather noticeably.
After I had added the photos, scaled them accordingly and added a temporary background colour, I hid the photo layers so that I could purely focus on copying and pasting my text onto the page. The three articles above have a greater word count than the ones in my previous post because I wanted to extend the reviews in case they didn't fill enough space. This way I could just delete any excessive material if there was too much. As you can see above there was a lot of text already and so I didn't want to add the review for Shades of Reason until I had organised the reviews into a better structure and more fixed position. With the Assassin's Creed review on the left, I started to split it into two columns to adjust the width and height of each column so that it fit all the text on.
When I looked at the width of the page I was working on, it seemed too long for a magazine and so I cropped it at the side to reduce it to a more realistic scale. In the screenshot above I have also made the photo layers visible again (leaving space for Shades of Reason) so that I can visualise both the text and the images together. I narrowed the second column of the Assassin's Creed review even further so that the text extended towards the bottom of the page.
At this point I inserted the screenshot for my own film but deleted the review for Rogue One whilst I worked on positioning the images. This is because when trying to select and drag an item in Photoshop where the layers overlap, it becomes difficult and you end up selecting the text instead. So I temporarily got ride of it whilst I adjusted where I wanted my images.
With this current visualisation, the page looks like it will be too crammed. But the review for La La Land will be in columns and look narrower, plus cropping the Assassin's Creed image and moving the columns closer together should make more space for the other two reviews to fit. I definitely think I made the right choice to put one of the smaller images along the bottom because otherwise the page looks too rigid with all of the review still shots along the top with the text underneath.
The purpose of using a background colour was to help distinguish the text when I put white boxes around it, as demonstrated above. In order to achieve this I used the rectangle shape tool to create boxes that covered the review and left a thin but distinct white border around the edge of the image as well. This gave the review its own definitive area confined within the white box. I then had to adjust the layers so that the text and photo were above the boxes, otherwise the review would be hidden behind the white. Although bland, the white background colour is a convention of magazines alongside black text. I also made another box to cover part of the image where the title is located, showing that the text and image are blending together.
Before I moved on to the other reviews, I wanted to make sure that I had settled for an effective layout on the review I was currently working on. I have added the film's biography under the title and tagline. I have experimented with all of the text by using a variety of fonts for the different parts of the text to make each section stand out individually as well as contributing to the review as a whole. I have given the verdict its own colour at the end of the article and put the introduction in bold to demonstrate the clear starting and ending point of the review. In addition to this, I have written the tagline in bold to show its importance under the title as well as added my star rating (I have put 3 instead of 2 so that I can move the third one to my next review and copy from there). Noticeably I gave the stars a colour rather than just black because I wanted it to be separate from the colour of the text and shown a continuation of the blue theme I began with the colour for my verdict.
It is also noticeable that I've moved the whole review downwards so that there is more space along the top than there is along the bottom, and this is because I am thinking about the section heading that I will need to include later on.
I did a continuation of this current layout by adding a box that would cover the review for Shades of Reason. I pasted the review and aligned it into a column, along with the title and star rating to examine what it looked like. At the moment I was slightly apprehensive about this because it didn't look very polished.
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