Evaluation 3 - How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

Somnium from Rosie Chatterjea on Vimeo.

In addition to our trailer, we intended to design and make a promotional package for our new film. We decided we would produce a poster and a magazine cover as both of these items are effective in advertising and promoting films to large numbers of people. The aim of our poster and magazine are to interest our potential audience by clearly expressing the genre of the film through both. The purpose of a poster is to show and not tell, in order to keep the viewer guessing and wanting to know more. A magazine cover on the other hand is designed to give readers a more detailed and informative insight into the film if they choose to read inside articles.

When we made our first plans on paper we were pleased with the designed and so kept to them almost perfectly but before doing this, we did some initial research into the conventions of both film posters and magazine covers. I found that posters have many necessary conventions for example a masthead which states the title of the film, a tagline, a main image, the release date and a billing black. All of these conventions allow the viewer to know all of the information they need if they intent to watch the film. We included all of these on our poster, with the title large at the top centre of the poster with a smaller font reading ‘A CHILDHOOD NIGHTMARE BROUGHT TO LIFE’ as the tagline. This tagline gives the audience a subtle insight into the narrative of the film, without giving too much away, and is also similar to the words of the intertitles. This links the two together showing that they are a package. Taglines are conventional for film posters as the idea is to keep the viewers wondering, similarly with film trailers.

We also included a billing block including names of various important people involved in the making of the production, for example director, producer, cast and more. Other conventions of a horror film poster include dark colour schemes, so we chose to use a dark grey scratched background with ghost like images of the cast overlaying. These features give a sense of fear and mystery and by doing this we were able to make the genre of our trailer much clearer to the audience, as oppose to if we used bright colours which often connote happiness.  The scratchiness links closely with the trailer as the titles throughout are also displayed on a similar background, and so therefore complement one another.  The scratches coming through on her faced also connote her struggle almost suggesting she is ‘broken’. This again creates questions about the narrative.

Titles from the trailer

Cracks through her face

The images we chose to include are a close up of Rosie’s terrified looking face and a plain and dark image of Evylyn Crick looking directly into the camera. The image of Evylyn appears behind Rosie which creates a feeling that she is watching you and her and makes the audience feel scared and threatened, which should allow the audience to identify that the poster is advertising a horror. This layout also links closely with the trailer itself, where it is evident that Evylyn is following and haunting Rosie throughout. We took the image of Layla on set when she was in full make up and costume. When shooting for the poster and magazine cover, we thought carefully about what kind of image would be best suited to the genre and storyline of our production. We took a variety of images of Rosie looking scared with make up running down her face as if she was crying, as the main narrative of the trailer is that she is being followed and taunted by her childhood nightmare and cannot escape. We have her looking in the opposite direction to make her look lost, alone and nervous. This makes viewers wonder what is troubling her and more importantly what Evylyn has to do with it. We also had her holding her hand in front of her face as this emphasised the idea that she is feeling scared and worried. This frightened image of Rosie links closely to many of the shots seen in the trailer, for example when she is crying on the bed.

We started in the same way for the magazine cover, by making some initial plans on a large sheet of paper. This allowed to mind map all of our first ideas ready to be refined soon after.

We used the same main image of Rosie for our magazine cover as the Poster in order to keep it recognisable for the audience; however we edited both pictures in different ways. While the poster images were quite light and ghost-like, our magazine cover involved us darkening the colours and adding a slightly reddish tone. We did this as the masthead (Grande Films) was also red. We kept this colour scheme of black, red and white constant throughout the whole cover as these colours connote danger and are also commonly seen in horror films. This helps to emphasise the genre to the readers. We chose to have a black background behind the image of Rosie as it creates a sense of unknown as it is unclear as to what could be waiting behind her.

We found that magazine covers, of all genres, also include necessary conventions which again give the reader all the information they need before buying. These include; a masthead, a main cover line, covers lines, a main image, strapline and more. We chose to follow these conventions in order to make our cover look professional as well as fully informing the reader. We positioned the masthead at the top centre of the page in a bold font aiming to stand out to the reader. We then inserted various cover lines about articles for new and upcoming films. The main cover line introduces an interview with the main character of our film which says ‘ROSIE GODDARD TALKS SOMNIUM’. We used the same font from the trailer for the word Somnium with the intention of linking the products together. This allows the audience to associate all of the products with each other.

Magazine

Poster

Trailer

Overall I feel that the combination of all our media products was effective in creating a complete promotional package. I feel we would be able to successfully sell out film through the trailer, poster and magazine cover that we have created, as each of them clearly tell the genre of the film and accurately display aspects of the narrative. The various themes we have used in each of the tasks is what makes them continually complement each other. Choosing to make both a poster and magazine cover allows us to reach out to a much wider audience, rather than if we were to just produce the trailer alone. We are happy with each of the products we have produced and think they will work very well together to promote out film, Somnium, as the connections between them all will grab the audience and make them very aware of the production.