Evaluation question 2

How effective is the combination of your

main product and ancillary texts?

Our a2 media studies coursework required me to make a film trailer which would go together with an ancillary task of making a film poster and magazine cover for the film. Our chosen genre was horror. We put the conventions of a horror film and the unique selling point for our audience into the three products. We did this in order to make the audience more interested in the product, but also to expand our audience and attract more people. Our main goal for the ancillary texts was to portray clearly the genre of the film, and to give the audience a small insight into what the film is about. Another thing we wanted to achieve was to make it clear what audience we were targeting, which was teenagers of both sexes aged 15-19

We tried to make our main product and our ancillary texts link together as much as possible. We did this in a number of ways. We used a number of different parts of our film to make the links between our ancillary texts, for example we used things that would be easily recognisable for the target audience to link like the masks which are very distinctive.

First of all we created a poster, which I did a lot of in depth research in to posters of the same genre to see what the conventions where. The film poster that i analysed was Friday the 13th. I found that the conventions of horror posters were that the base colour was often one colour, most likely black, white or red, as these are colours associated with horror films. The posters also usually contain an image that is key in the film, for example a main character or object that makes the audience wonder what it is about. The Friday the 13th poster that I analysed is also where I gained some inspiration from.

Here is another poster I analysed

Magazine coverI also researched a lot in to magazine covers, of both horror genre and not. I found a number of differences and similarities between all magazine covers. There is usually always a big titles, a large image covering the majority, if not all of the cover, and a number of sub titles down the sides of the images, sometimes at the bottom. Here is an image that me and my group created showing the usual convention of a magazine front cover.

Our magazine cover

Our magazine cover involved an image of a masked man that features through out the film, and are the main characters. We chose to use this image as it is easy to recognise for the target audience. In addition to this we thought that this image would attract people who do not necessarily know what the film is about because the image is mysterious and intriguing.

In conclusion…Overall I believe that our ancillary texts are linked well with our film trailer, we have used a number of different images, fonts and colour schemes to make them all link together, and also attract the target audience at the same time.