Evaluation 2

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

Both of my ancillary tasks have the same greyscale colour scheme to fit with the typical use of dark colours in the horror genre. This also makes them stand out from the other brightly coloured magazines/posters around them - as I found in my research that most magazines/posters use bright colours to make themselves stand out, and decided that what would make my media different is to use no bright colours. The film itself also has a very dark colour scheme and hopefully this would make people associate it with the other promotional materials.

The title is the same on every text to promote synergy. This will make the audience remember the name better and hopefully reach a point where they know what the film title says without even reading it fully. The images used in all three texts focus on our main character, Holly, because she isn't played by a well-known actress and so we couldn't just mention her name and get people to watch the film. We also want the audience to see her and immediately think of the film.

The trailer is the only text that suggests what the plot of the film is as it uses non-diegetic clips and voiceovers to tell the audience what's happening. There is non-chronological editing used though as we don't want the audience to be able to predict how the plot goes before seeing the film and also to add a sense of mystery to it. The magazine cover and poster are vague on purpose but through the use of clichés (such as smoke and trees) they tell the audience that the film is in the horror genre. This is to emphasise the fact that the film has a major plot twist in it and we don't want to give that away to the viewer as we want the film to shock them.

Our target audience would spend a lot of time online so we made the trailer short on purpose to keep their interest and also so that we could make it an advert at the start of YouTube videos - which potentially could give us an international audience. The magazine would only be sold in the UK, which is where our main target audience would be, and we would also make sure that the poster would be seen by an UK audience.

We also added a hashtag and website to the end of our trailer to encourage people to talk about the film with their friends and do more research on it. The audience would want to be scared by the film, which is why I made the poster and magazine cover look mysterious but obviously from the horror genre. The trailer goes in a different direction and tries to fool the audience into thinking that the film is a teen angst initially, which is another genre that our target demographic would enjoy, but it's something I wouldn't be able to recreate for the ancillary tasks.

The institutional information is also repeated throughout the texts. The 'LEV Productions' logo is at the beginning of the trailer and at the bottom of the film poster so that the audience would begin to associate the film to the company. I also added a mention of the production company on the front of my magazine cover to further emphasise the relation of it to the film.

Overall, I think that it would be an effective promotional campaign as I've focused on the synergy between the three texts, with the combination of colours, images of the actress and production company. That will make the audience associate the film, production company and main actress to each other, while also letting them know effectively that the film is in the horror/thriller genre. I also made my texts around what my target audience would want to see, which would make them more likely to see my film.