How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

In order for the film to be successful and be thrust in front of its target audience’s eyes, it needs to have a distribution plan which, using various media platforms, will advertise and promote the film.
Such include:


• TV Ads
• Cinema Ads
• Website Ads
• Posters
• Billboards
• Online- official website

As I had to produce a poster as one of my ancillary tasks, and I knew that the trailer and the poster work together in a co-ordinated fashion in order to become the sort of brand identity for the film as well as being the central advertising images, it’s important that they both match up in terms of themes, colours, fonts, images etc. so that they are effective in combination. Although I think the poster I created is separately successful in terms of coinciding with the themes and conventions of a film poster, it remains separate somewhat because of the lack of recurring fonts and colours etc. evident in my trailer. Examples of this include the way the title of the movie is presented. I found this font during the production of the poster, and really thought that the look of it not only went with the theme of the film but looked great, so it made sense to me to make use of it. I imagine a real distributor would go back and then cut the any new preferred fonts etc into the trailer, however this was something time wouldn't allow.In terms of the images I've used, once again, this particular shot of Ella wasn't used within the trailer, nor one like it, however I feel that her character is not necessarily easy to get confused about because of her age etc. I edited the photo in such a way so that it is quite abstract and artistic, as in the audience feedback we gathered it was mentioned more than once that the trailer had a sort of surreal nature to it and was enjoyed, so I attempted to translate that into my poster. In other ways I have successfully connected my poster to my trailer in that the billing block states the same production company/director/actors and so on. Another way I could have done so would have been including the same tag-line we have stated inter-titles of my trailer, but in a way I think the kind of simplistic style of poster I wanted (more just a main eye-catching image and title) would have been hindered by doing so. In terms of staying within the conventions of a horror poster in general, I have coloured the background black, used red in contrast to this to connotate darkness, danger etc. and included a rating certificate as well as the release date of the film. I found that the analysis of real horror movie posters helped me to structure the basic the layout of the poster and I feel that it therefore looks more realistic.

The other ancillary task we had to complete was a film magazine cover, an obvious product of a successful film and distributing, as well as a further advertisement. I imitated an already existing film magazine but created my own logo. I noticed that in some examples of actual Total Film magazine covers, instead of just having the actor as a central image from a film that is the main article, that sometimes an overall theme is exclusive to that particular issue. For example, sci-fi films. I decided this would be ideal for my version of the cover because I struggled to get a picture to use as a central image of Ella, and I felt that the image I used of the woods wasn't necessarily ineffective. This time, I used the same font for the title of the film on the poster on the magazine, because by this point, in theory, the film's obvious success which would equal a solid brand identity, and once again had I have had enough time I would have cut that font into the trailer. I maintained the theme of black red and white, which I think has been a feature of all three products. In retrospect, the co-ordination of my products could have been better executed, and although I was better at actually producing the texts due to prior knowledge of the programmes, I do feel my knowledge of the way in which distributors work could have been demonstrated better.