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

I think that as a promotional package my trailer and ancillary tasks work really well together. In my poster I have tried to recreate scenes and use characters which the audience would be able to recognise, in an attempt to link all the products together. I think it appropriately advertises the film and could rally an audience in order for success as a theatrical release. 


By having a poster to accompany my trailer I can target a much larger audience due to the fact you can place a poster almost anywhere and it can be viewed by countless people, while a trailer can only be viewed through cinemas, the internet and through television. This means that the poster will play an absolutely vital role in advertising the trailer, acting almost as a lure to try and attract audiences. Hopefully after seeing the poster audiences would try to find out more about the movie, by searching for it online and viewing the trailer, or by buying the magazine to read more about it. The magazine plays a similar but smaller role to the poster and would be part of a much larger scheme to attempt to publicise the movie and reach the biggest demographic possible. 


By getting the movie into magazines such as Empire you can create hype about the product. If people start to see articles and posters about the movie in countless places it will start to create a fan base for the movie and should help to create a massive for the release.  In order for the advertising and publicity to link together I tried to create products which all link up together visually and have obvious link between them. One thing I did decide to carry on throughout my ancillary tasks was the green theme; this green style went against the general forms and conventions of horror as it is more often used as a colour within the sci-fi genre. I decided that in order to keep my products seem like they were linked and flow together nicely. Although the green theme goes against basic horror conventions I think that I would actually work in the favour of the movie by helping it stand out from other horrors, also having a green filter throughout the movie may also attract parts of the sci-fi target demographic that would see the movie as it looks appealing to them. Little things like this are all factors in attracting further potential customers. The idea behind my film poster was that it would be very crisp and clean and I think I have fulfilled that. 


One thing I found useful while creating the poster was the auto alignment feature on Photoshop. This allowed me to get all my different sections of text and image on the poster centred with each other and this contributed to that clean look that I feel I have achieved. I settled on the poster being very dark and having just the eye of the main antagonist in the centre. I think that just using the single eye works really well, it reminds me of the scene where the flashlight shines on the antagonists face. I think the use of black space within my poster and magazine cover helps increase the feeling of danger and isolation in an attempt to really involve some key horror.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   I chose to design my magazine cover as an Empire magazine, in order to make the masthead I took a copy of empires masthead and selected the area and filled it in myself, I then illustrated it so it had drips coming off it in order to suit the horror style. I took the main front cover image of my friend on a digital camera and then played around with it on Photoshop, changing the levels and saturation until parts of her face were hidden. I like the way the shadows on her face have turned out, I think the low key lighting suits the ambiguous horror style really well. Through studying copies of empire magazine I found there are often key features which are included on every cover that they produce. I have tried to include these within my front cover in my own style which suits the ‘horror style’ issue I have produced.