EVALUATION 2

Q2. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

 

A marketing campaign is vital to our film; it is to attract an audience to the media product we created. The ancillary tasks were created purposely to gain some form of interest from audiences in order to create more recognition and higher sale volumes. The methods we chose to take were film posters and review. 

A poster and review are important parts of a campaign. They all share a relationship with each other to entice the audience. The posters are used to raise questions about the film, capturing the audience’s attention. The review then answers some of those questions and then the audience use the film to see the whole picture.

When creating my ancillary texts it was important I kept to a house style that matched my film, which also communicates the genres to a clear target audience. I believe our film reaches out to audiences who like emotional films, similar to Kieran’s character age who I found from research into genre’s audience’s are most likely to be drawn to our film. Also the moral of the story applies mostly to audiences which might have undergone some form of problem within their lives. This made my ancillary tasks an effective combination with ‘Light through Darkness’. 

 My posters are part of a series of three. During there creation I considered the colour scheme, in which I used grey, whites and blacks. This was to emphasise the key genres of the film (of a tragedy which he later recovers from). From my poster research I saw common conventions of drama and emotional films, such as the faded black bold text I used similar to ‘Acolytes’ and ‘The Blind Side’ and general colour scheme I chose to take two screen shots from the film instead of creating a false background, to me this stands out because the audience can gain a very detailed insight just from two shots blended together. The font I went with was very simple and straight forward, the film has nothing fancy about it-disability is a touchy subject to focus on so we thought the more simple the better. We intended to make the font big in order to be clear on the poster because of all the distracting film screen shots-this was mainly to be clear about what we wanted the audience to know and see; it is an absolute must to ensure the audience know the release date, title of the film and what the film may be about just from looking at the poster. This is a common feature when looking at most other film posters. Not only emotional drams.

One audience feedback said... “Another good aspect on this poster is the use of font which blends in with the theme because it’s simple and doesn’t have any curly or swishing fonts to it. The tag line "Some journeys go further then you could have ever imagined" is very powerful because it links in with the theme.

Overall this poster doesn’t really fall into the theme of the film and it could have been pretty much more effective to show that its about a blind boy however the work effort behind it is great”

Every film company doesn’t want to waste money presenting something which might be hard to work out by audiences and film goers, as a result of this we thought we’d stick to the common conventions and go along with the importance of clarity. The layout of text was intentionally positioned not to block the screen shots from the film, we overlapped the tagline and title but in places which had nothing to show behind it, this was to also cleverly use spare space around the poster but at the same time not clog the A4 posters.

Although my feedback from my posters was that my more modern poster (poster three) would be more appealing to the audience as because of the others being based on older film poster layouts and colour schemes they matched the current conventions of an emotional heartbreak. The audience said “I also think that the idea of the light coming through the poster links in with the title of your film "light through darkness". On reflection using too many different fonts and the use of plain grey made my poster a less effective combination to my film. Although I also feel I effectively portrayed Kieran in the campaign.

By using Kieran’s image in every poster I can convey that he is the main character and of the most importance in the film this cleverly highlights that the film is surrounded around this young male. I went against using images of the Kieran and his mother or friends as I think it would leave the viewer slightly confused as to who is the main character, I wanted to make it clear who the film evolves around leaving no confusion about who to look out for during the film.

 The use of his original images connotes the message going through his head as being depressed and confused which put6s a firm stamp on what the films about. Films such as the blind side, Buried and Ray are all different forms of a emotional film and use this convention to reach out and touch people who watch the film. However from seeing this I believe it was more suitable to the film to only show Kieran’s character, as the other characters don’t represent being mentally or physically touched by a tragedy, and the audience can understand the film’s plot is about who Kieran is, and what happens to him, rather than his relationship with friends and family.

I wanted to combine the abstract element of the film, with the drama. For this I used images of Kieran positioned on the bed slightly looking upwards, this links in with his odd flashbacks shown in the film. The positioning appeals to the audience because it shows some form of memory-this will urge the viewer to question ‘what else he is thinking about?’ The tagline ‘some journeys go further than you could have ever imagined’ also highlighted the journey our main protagonist will venture on.

My review is also important to the distribution of my film, it needed to sell my film to my target audience of young men, women and film enthusiasts. My use of language reflected this as I wrote in a similar tone to my Empire magazine examples, however I used less film ‘Ray’ and references as to be accessible to an average audience too. Building a relationship with my audience and the film. My review can also help me advertise to the industry as well, but highlight it as an independent film, suggesting its strengths and weaknesses as a product and helping the film maker become known in the industry. As a whole my ancillary tasks and review needed to be presented as a brand image. By using a house style throughout and presenting the themes of the film to both the industry and my target audience, my campaign has a highly effective combination with the main product, my only weakness was using elements of an older poster in my own series. Commenting on my review I choose to re-create Empire magazines mainly because of their well known reputation reviewing many A class films from all over the world. Empire has a huge fan base who follow their reviews and buy their magazines. I believe having a feature in the magazine we could compete with the likes of sold cinema films and some how is able to promote our filming alongside the biggest and the best.

Whilst planning out my film review I had to keep the layout as realistic as possible and to look closely at the original spread from Empire magazine, this meant I had to make sure the right pictures were chosen to place within the review in order to capture the reader’s eyes. My review looks realistic and a lot like the real Empire article, I believe I blended the text and sizes together well and also deeply thought about the text to include within the review, another strength was my idea to use a review which included other film reviews, this added to the realism effect.