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

As well as creating a horror trailer as a promotional package for a horror film, we also created a horror film poster based on our film and a film magazine cover used to publicise our film.

When making my poster, in order to attract our audience, I wanted to show them that this would be a slasher film, but not show them too much to make them think they've seen it all. I had a very cool idea of putting the viewers in the shoes of one of the victims to make them feel more attached to the film. To me, this poster is very obscure as to who the man in the mask is, only people who have viewed the trailer will know that he is the killer. So viewers will see the poster and then research the film to find the trailer and then see the film. I thought of this as a sort of "ladder of knowledge" it will hopefully sift out anyone who really doesn't want to see the film and gain us our target audience.

I think that my ancillary texts and my trailer work very well together mainly because I based my ancillary texts on one particular shot that is shown in the trailer. This has linked my ancillary texts and created an overall picture that represents the film. I think that this could be a very good potential selling point, it would mean that people would see the picture and think of the film like how someone would look at a logo and think of the company. In my opinion my poster does a very good job of advertising the film and linking in with the trailer because the picture used in the poster is from a shot in the trailer that I believe to be one of the main shots because it shows the monster clearly holding a pitchfork as a weapon. One of my favourite parts of my poster is the eye outline that I created to merge the background with the photo and make the viewer feel trapped inside a helpless person, the great thing about this idea is that the helpless person is actually Andrew from the film and you are looking through his eyes at the killer. This links the poster with the film very well in my opinion because it is not only a shot taken from it that shows the monster, but it also puts the viewer into the shoes of a helpless victim of the monster.

In order to combine my poster and our trailer in further detail I used one of the trailer titles to explain a bit about the film, but of course on a poster you don’t want to see a block of text, you want to see pictures and it needs to stand out to its audience. I chose “your house brings back friends from the past” I chose this specific part because it contains vital information for understanding who and what the monster is, not only that but it promotes the use of Freud’s theory of repression (bad happenings in the past return to haunt the current owners of the house). This theory has popped up in many different horror films and to show this in the trailer is a real bonus, because it is said to be a very scary factor in horror movies, it gives the illusion that the monster is unbeatable, unstoppable and this in turn makes the monster much more scary.

I feel that the creation of my magazine cover was very successful, the research that was carried out before hand on one of my previous posts (analysis of film magazine covers) really helped me understand what fonts to use, what colour style, where to place certain information and other general conventions of magazine advertisements. Our work on magazines last year was also a great help, we used Photoshop to create magazine covers, contents and double page spreads. This did very much help with knowledge of Photoshop and remembering certain aspects that make your work look more professional. The great thing about having your film featured on a magazine cover is it gains you alot of publicity through journalists writing, there is a huge range of audiences who respond to journalists writing which means that through this type of publicity we can sift our way through to our target audience. Journalists can also be sent press kits containing information on the film, cast, narrative etc.