BFI London Film Festival: Testament of Youth - Review

On Thursday 16th October we went to Leicester Square Odeon cinema to see the debut of James Kent's new film Testament of Youth based on the book by Vera Brittain. Afterwards we sat for a q&a with him where we learned why we he chose to work on the film, the reasoning behind the way he shot certain scenes and heard some on set stories.

This film is a historical drama based on the memoirs of Vera Brittain written in 1933. Vera, played by Alicia Vikander, was a girl unlike the others of her time and dedicated herself to study opposed to finding a suitable husband. She does however go on to fall for Roland ( Kit Harrington ) and after he signs up to fight in World War I she postpones her studies at Oxford to serve as a nurse in London and later on France. 

I really enjoyed this film as it told a coming of age story and was believable to the time period it was set in. Its use of costume and non diegetic sound is what I think helped make this convincing as both were familiar to that era.  I think the actors chosen played the parts well and Vikander made it easy for the audience to get attached to her character through showing realistic emotion in every scene she was in. Although the film told Brittain's memories how she recorded them I feel the film was a bit long and tried to include too many of her experiences and not focusing on the most important part of the film for long enough.

I would give the film a 7/10 as I was kept interested the whole way through and think that its important that people like Vera Brittain be remembered, however for me the film was too long and hard to understand. For example, at times it was hard to tell the difference between Roland, her brothers and their friends also her relationship with Roland developed quickly through various letters without us really seeing when it began.

Magazine Evaluation

Our magazine was called 'Inspire' and aimed at 16 -19 year olds. We aimed to target everybody and realise now that it may have been best to target a specific audience as although we covered fashion, sport, film, current affairs and music, we didn't include much more than 2 pages on each. The first thing we did was plan what we wanted to be in our magazine and then gave an article to each person with 5 articles in total and me and Denise working on the front cover, contents, photographs to be taken and editing.

 We started with the contents page and looked at other magazines such as 'Marie Claire' and followed their layouts as guidance. At first we decided who we wanted on the front cover and so went and took some pictures of Hasan for his fashion page and also for the front cover. We then took these and imported them into photo shop and worked around them adding in article titles. I found it hard using photo shop and editing text boxes that I had earlier put in and so switched to using Illustrator. I preferred working on Illustrator because it is software designed for making magazines and so I found it easier moving text boxes and images round to make them look more like a magazine. To also help with this and make the magazine look more clean and professional, next time I would stick to a colour scheme throughout the magazine as we chose the colour scheme of burgundy and white and although we kept to this on the front cover and contents page, there was all different colours on the pages inside.

The contents page didn't turn out how I had pictured it to look but I do like the way the articles are numbered with their titles. Next time I would include more pictures linked to articles inside and caption these, also change the back ground so that its not block colour.