3) Evaluation Task 3
- 1. EvaluationTask 3 How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
- 2. What we did We was to create a promotional package for a film we was making, “THE DOOR”. By doing this we hope to achieve our audiences interest and hope that they would want to watch the full film in cinemas.To do this we would create three things: The movie trailer. The movie poster. A magazine front cover.
- 3. Research We had already decided on the horror genre and therefore we had to gather information surrounding it. This included things such as our target audience and different conventions that are common to the horror genre. After doing so, we was confident that we could create 3 professional looking products, that not only looked good, but worked well in conjunction with each other. Further research included analysing other media texts such as Goodnight Mommy and Sinister. Including looking at their film posters and any horror magazines.
- 4. Design Designing the ancillary tasks proved an important and vital part to the overall success of them. A lot of work was put into the design including: Genre TargetAudience Plotline Fonts Titles Colour Conventions
- 5. Themes There are two main themes within the trailer: The Door The Dead Girl It was extremely important to keep at least one of these two themes alive at all times across all 3 elements of our promotional package.To do this, we made the main theme of our poster “The Door” and the main theme of our magazine “The Dead Girl”. Red held all the closest connotations to most of our main themes, connoting death, therefore this a recurrent colour across all platforms. However, regarding the dead girl we decided to use juxtaposition to compliment us challenging the Male Gaze theory; which suggests women are only there for men to look at, they are made to be attractive as men will appreciate this; this clearly isn’t the case in our trailer.We dressed her in white which is use of juxtaposition as white commonly connotes pureness.
- 6. The Poster The poster produces the exact image we want our trailer to give off. It is a lone image of a door, giving it a cold hearted appearance, this is everything we want our audience to feel when they see the poster and relate it back to the film. Following the theme of red we chose to place it upon a black background. Black not only connotes death but really made the red memorable and stand out.We carried this theme across both our poster and magazine cover, and the black gave them both an ominous look. This also kept everything consistent giving the promotional package a professional look as a whole.
- 7. The Magazine We had to adopt the style of EMPIRE MAGAZINE but find a way to make it our own, keeping our main themes present. We did so by keeping the colours of red and black present.We kept the black background and put a red glow around the main image; but still kept elements of EMPIRE such as the titles design and layout of the page as a whole. (Title, barcode, what’s inside etc). The main sections of text were written in white oer the black background, this made them stand out but also connotes the binary oppositions theme of good vs evil.This is present in both our poster (White text, black background) and our trailer as our protagonist is against our antagonist.
- 8. AncillaryTasks The production of the two ancillary tasks we chose to make, it allows us to promote our product on platforms that moving images (our trailer) wouldn’t be able to be displayed.
- 9. Conclusion The combination of our ancillary tasks and trailer work much more effectively than we only had a trailer on its own.They are also noticeably from the same package even if the title was removed as they carry the same themes and colours, giving “The Door” a professional look overall.The fact that the same themes are carried from trailer to ancillary tasks ensures that our audience can easily recognise the genre and aspects of our film. If our film was real I feel that through everything we have created, we would be able to successfully sell and promote the film as we have included and followed conventions of other successful films that are proven to work. However, compared to these professionally made films, we have much less experience and a much smaller budget, meaning that we are unable to use as high quality equipment such as cameras, mics and even our understanding of the software will be much smaller than that of a professional editor.This may give our product a more amateur look when placed next to a more professionally made product.