How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
With my promotional package I really wanted to create a package that would apply to a mass audience I felt that the story line was very intriguing and would be almost relatable to everyone above the age of 15, hence the age rating of our film being a 15. We have a mass audience of females going to the cinema as it has a female lead therefore it is more relatable to them. But from this we have also found that these women will often go to the cinema with friends and boyfriends or out on a date. From our research on target audience we also gave example of the types of mass and niche audience that would come to see our film.
I feel like all of our final products round up to be an all-together well-rounded project, our three texts work together to sell the final film as they all have been produced without looking like an amateur attempt of trying to create media texts.
By using the same fonts throughout our ancillary task we was able to tie them all together and making it look well rounded, therefore people can clearly see that they are all linked.
You can see by looking at our magazine article that we are clearly marketing to a niche audience of people that read the ‘total film’ magazine. By using the image of the main male lead we have shaped more of a male audience to the film although if you were to compare that to our poster you might also say that with that we are looking at more of a female based target audience, so bringing these together we have created a wider target audience. So by directing our entire ancillary task to different target audience we are able to get more people viewing our product.
Analysis of Trailer
I feel that our trailer works well when compared to real media texts as I have the right use of conventions and in challenging those conventions where I feel it is most suitable and able to work. I feel that my research has helped immensely when looking at what to add to my trailer. The most successful part to my trailer I sense is the use of the different jump shots, we have added juxtaposition in which helps to portray the meaning behind the film. The use of different clips has really helped to grasp the idea that it is the middle between heaven and hell, which is what the word purgatory means.
By using dark colours in our trailer we have been able to capture a mood that have people sitting on the edge of their seat with a sense of thrill as well, which is what we aim for when looking at a thriller. The trailer has a cliffhanger at the end where you see that so called villain carry the girl off into the woods; this makes people want to watch the film, which is what our job was to do. By having a cliffhanger we have also given them a slight glimpse into what happens into our film and this is what a lot of trailers use in order to intrigue the audience to come and watch their film.
The only difficulties that we had to overcome when filming is the fact that our original actor that was meant to play the girl couldn’t make it to any filming sessions, as so had to find a replacement in which I volunteered for. This worked out even better because I was able to carry the camera around with me and therefore film things that we had not originally planned to film. These parts I filmed were also the main basis of the film as they were the most effective shots because the behavior wasn’t being put on and therefore looked more realistic. Most of the shots that you see of the main character ‘Caleb’ in the trailer are actually shots that were taken by accident and these shots were the ones that we really thought worked well.
Other issues that we also had to overcome is the fact that we didn’t always want our film to be shot in the day light and because of this the camera couldn’t naturally be a clear crisp image and this made some of our filming blurry and therefore we were not able to necessarily use it.
Overall though I feel that our most successful task was definitely the finished trailer in comparison to the poster and the magazine cover. It has the edge that I fell that we need in order to push our grade of as we have used many different shots, camera angles and editing skills used with in the piece. The fact that we have used many different locations complies with the conventions of any film trailer, as they are typically snippets from different parts of the film that the producers feel would intrigue mass audience.
Although the weaknesses of this product may be that the trailer could have maybe been a little bit longer, this would have helped us to enable that we could have got a lot more convention with in the trailer. We may have also had a lot more footage if the camera was able to film in darker situations because this is one of the problems that we faced, but to overcome this we used knowledge of what we already had developed in AS in order to sharpen the pixels that used to play the video, this helped slightly. But I think the main way that we could have resolved this problem is definitely by having a higher definition camera.
Analysis of posters
Our posters I feel were very successful in making our film trailer package as they tied in nicely with the theme by using conventions that we had already looked at when it comes down to the researching what was included in a film poster. I have tried to include as much as I could on the poster trying to keep it simple yet as effective as possible and I felt this worked. By using photo shop I was able to edit the images to make the background darker and lighter where I wanted and I was able to create a contrast in the colours that helped to define the emotions that are on the actors face. The use of the candle in one of the posters I felt really brought out the idea of being alone and the lack of ‘electrical’ light helps to portray the feeling or being deserted, which is what our film is about almost. The font that I have chosen
Difficulties we had when doing our poster was with the lighting and the camera we used. Originally we had a Cannon camera that we thought would create a really clear image and later found that when we looked back at the picture we would clearly see that the image was very blurry. To overcome this we then looked at all the cameras that we had and concluded the best quality camera that we had was one of the actor’s phones, and strangely we could have not found a better quality picture. When I put the picture on to Photoshop the image was crisp and this is what I feel a good film poster must have because otherwise it just isn’t appealing to the eye. People look at our ancillary and will conclude an idea of what they feel our trailer will be like, therefore we wanted our posters and magazines to be on the same level as what we believed our trailer would turn out like. To resolve the problem of the lighting I used my lamp and turned off all the other lighting this helped because the candle didn’t produce enough light to make a clear picture, it looked very pixilated. Also the light angles properly just looked like the light from the candle, in which I feel, helped our poster be the success it was.
The weaknesses of this product I feel is the lack of experience of editing I had when I came to using Photoshop as I had never used it before. If I was to have previous experience I think I would have been able to create a lot more tone without it looking as edited as it has. Although I don’t feel like this is a major weakness and I am still proud of the outcome. One more thing that I feel could have helped is having a larger variety of text to choose from because although I wanted an old English styled text I felt that this one was a little boring but no others fit the font I was hoping for. If I could have done it again I would have chosen to do them a lot later on in the project because I could have used a different setting that may have suited the theme more, because the background is very plain and boring and goes against the normal conventions of a thriller film poster. The fact that the background is very plain can either work in our favor or go against us, because I feel maybe if we had a darker background with someone stood in the background it may have been more intriguing. Although I also think it may act in our favor because if there was more in the background there may have been too much to look at and may have over crowded the image. These weaknesses are not massive and I feel that overall they turned out better than me and Shelby had expected.
Analysis of film magazine
Our film poster I would say was our least successful product as we had originally planned to do something similar to our final piece but the work corrupted as so quickly had to look at remaking what we could remember from the old one. Although I felt that this may have happened in favour of us because we able to take a new picture that I felt really captured to mood of our film. The use of colours in our magazine cover, I feel in some ways fit the description of a thriller genre, but then again I look at it and it doesn’t catch my eye as much as I would have hoped our magazine cover to have done. The uses of red merge from the conventions although I feel that maybe if it was a lot darker in the background it would be a more eye catching piece. I think that if we had made Luke take the picture while wearing a hoodie this would have created more of a character for the audience, portraying the certain characteristics of the character, but then again I feel that he is stripped down and so shows the vulnerable side to the harsh facial expression used.
So as I have already stated we had a lot of difficulties with losing our work, but as soon as we came across the problem we resolved it by looking through all work/research that we had done on magazine covers and started again. Because we already had an idea of what we needed it to look like it didn’t take as long as the first time that we did it, although this was still a major setback in completing our work on time. Deciding what we wanted the image to be of and who we wanted it to be of was also a major issue as we could not decide out of our three characters that would be the most appropriate to be the cover of our magazine. So to solve this we took pictures of each of the characters, so Luke Ella and I and decided what image suited the best and whose character was being portrayed best in the facial expressions and body language. We found it hard as well to get enough space at the top of the image in order to get the title in and not cover the title too much, so this took a while and we have to use several attempts at taking pictures in order for it to work out.
The successes in the magazine cover is probably the fact that it is not like a normal magazine cover and in comparison to all of the other covers I’ve looked at doesn’t look too crowded like some and also doesn’t look to bare like others. I feel that our is at equilibrium, if there is too much writing on a page people tend not to even look at it and if there is not enough then people will get this impression that it is too simplistic and therefore we looked at creating an equal amount of writing that people wouldn’t get bored of.
Overall Shelby and I wanted to create three products that were able to draw the attention of different target audiences that would have made people want to watch our final film. The all show each of our films in a professional manor and all work well as a final product. The use of the same text throughout has helped to create a theme that people will be able to generalise between each of the products. The use of the same deep red in all of our products has also helped to portray the thriller theme and I felt made a very effective final project.
