Evaluation Question Two

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

James Bentley

Ancillary TextsAn ancillary text is a vital component when distributing a film. It is a good way to show your product to a wider audience. And this carries great importance as without an audience there would be no point in making a film, and the film industry would not be what it is without audiences.

As a group we had to create two different ancillary texts, to distribute to our target audience; both male and females aged between 15 and 30 and fans of action and crime films. Our products obviously had to relate to the film that we had created, and needed to be made in such a way to interest viewers into a desire to watch our film, so we wanted to grab their attention but not give too much away.

Although there were many media platforms we could have chose to create an ancillary text from, we chose to create a poster and a radio trailer in order to advertise our film.

With research into similar posters and radio trailers, we knew what things should be included in our ancillary texts.

Posters

A poster is a very effective way of selling a product as they can be accessed, viewed and interpreted by a wide audience. This is due to them been seen in places like, cinemas, bus stops and buses themselves, online and on billboards to name a few places. As the amount of people that would see this is high, and because the volume of posters out there is high, it is important to create a poster that stands out among those of its competitors.

As a starting point, I began researching and finding similar examples, of other films similar to ours and their posters, in order to give me inspiration for the design for a poster I wished to create. This meant looking at fonts of titles, graphology that should be included and the taglines, which are an imperative part when advertising a product as it is something that sticks in the mind.

Poster Analysis

As part of my research, I chose a poster from a film with a similar genre to ours. ‘Skyfall’ was the poster I chose to analyse, this is the poster with my analysis on it, which gave me a good understanding of what makes a good poster.

From this poster I decided to take a ‘less is more’ approach to my poster design as is the case in the poster I analysed.

As well as this I made sure to include the key components of a poster such as the title, the key production names and roles and the release date as well as images of the lead characters.

My Own Ancillary TextThis was my rough design for a poster, and I stuck to the idea of leaving much to the imagination of the viewing audience. The large font was simply chosen to stand out and the three images are of the main characters, the one in the middle being the focus as the main character and the other two smaller and further in the background looking in on the main image, to represent that the whole film revolves around the middle man being cut out.

I also made sure to include the important aspects such as future release date, the key production components and the age certificate of 15.

It is important to remember that this is only a rough draft of an idea and not the final film poster.

The Final PosterWe took these photos separately to shots from our film so that we could get the best quality out of the shots. As it turned out we took all three drafts into consideration and created a poster with elements from all three. We inserted separate images from online sources that we used as props in our film. This adds a specific element of what is to be expected in the film as it is clear to see from the poster that the film will involve guns, blood and therefore presumptions of death.Finally the things we made sure to include were a tagline at the very top, reviews that help to sell the film, as good ratings make for a good film, and the cast, film name and production members as expected from film posters.

Evaluation of our Film Poster

Personally I was happy with the poster we created as a group. It has the look of intensity that we intended to create and the look of a crime/thriller poster with the aspects we included. And as we created a poster relevant to the genre of our film I think that we definitely made a successful poster. As this poster is true to the genre of film we created I think it successfully helps to sell our film as the audience would know what to expect when viewing the film from what they have seen on our poster.

I think that we could have improved the poster by including reference to the film we made in our AS studies as this would have brought together the two years and projects we did, as well as showing a progression from As to A2.Furthermore I think we could have improved the poster by removing one or two images or by possibly making it more simplistic, as we could have fallen into the trap of overloading the poster which could be too much for a viewing audience.

Radio TrailerRadio trailers are very similar to posters as they can be a very effective way of broadening the target audience of a product. They can be heard on a variety of radio stations. And with the volume of people that listen to radio over a range of platforms it is a good way of advertising to wider audience.

To research for radio trailers, I found some examples of different types of radio trailers and listened to the radio to see if I could pick out some film trailers, but due to the number of adverts on radio stations it was easy to miss some advertisements.

For an idea for our ancillary text 0f a radio trailer I thought it was a good idea to simply have a range of dialogue from our film and sound effects such as gunshots, followed by key information about the film and its release date.

Our Radio Trailer

Our radio trailer followed the same idea to mine in a rough aspect, however some effects of a technological difficulty was added, as if the radio station had been taken over by the team behind the film.

This is from our final radio trailer upload, which can be heard on YouTube, we put a black screen with the explanation on to assure viewers that the video is audio only as it is a radio trailer.Below is a link to the radio trailer:http://bca2media2015group11.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/radio-trailer.html

Ancillary Texts Evaluation

In conclusion I believe that ancillary texts are the best way to attract an audience to a film. They can reach a large number of people in a large number of ways. Posters and radio trailers are two of the best ways to reach a vast potential audience and for that reason I think we have succeeded in creating two successful ancillary texts.