How effective is the combination of your main

product and ancillary texts?

The ancillary texts that we have created to accompany our film are both crucial to the success of our main product as a whole; both our magazine review and our radio trailer are very similar in their purpose. Both of the products are used to advertise and publicise the main product – the film, this is crucial to building interest in the film and so ensuring that it has enough exposure to the target audience. We believe that our ancillary products have very good synergy and work extremely well together to create a brand-type visual iconography.

Magazine Review

The magazine article that we produced uses a series of techniques to catch the reader’s attention and therefore provides them with information about the film that we feel will make them want to watch it. We have used reviews from critics in order to gain attention as they are featured as quotes in bold writing. This in turn interests the audience and makes them want to watch the main product, this use of film critic reviews to give the audience information seems to be effective, as all of the magazine articles we analysed in the research stage of our production appeared to use them to help tell the audience about the film.

Magazine Review

(Click here to view an example of a magazine review)

Also, to maintain the brand image of the film, we included stills from our film in the magazine review. We made sure that these were large and gave the reader information about the genre of the film and also the visual iconography of the film. They help to give the reader information about the genre of the film as they clearly show that the main protagonist is upset and so suggests a drama genre. We also decided to make the stills large and

Magazine Review

cut into the text so that they caught the reader’s eye. These also act as enigma codes that restrict information from the character such as her full costume and what she’s doing in the still to make them want to find out for themselves and watch the film.(Click here to see our magazine review.)

All of our ancillary texts have many things in common which help publicise the film and strengthen the synergy. The restriction of information is a very important tool to sell the film. The ancillary texts must give enough information away to make the audience intrigued but not too much information in order not to spoil the main products effectiveness. Both of our texts use this restriction of information to help sell our main product.

There is a very clear example of this in our magazine review in the use of the taglinewhich is a technique we have used to make the readers more interested as the magazine review doesn’t give them too much information.

Even our main product employs the use of restricting information in a way, not revelling to the audience that the main protagonist is a runaway until the end of the film.

Enigma Codes

(Click here to see our film.)

Radio Trailer

Our radio trailer follows the main forms and conventions which we discovered in our research stage whereby we studied pre-existing trailers and compared them. Many of the radio trailers we looked at utilise the use of sound bites from the film such as dialogue. This allows the audience to imagine what is happening in the film without giving anything away, thus selling the main product and being another example of where we used enigma codes to create intrigue. We did this by picking pieces of dialogue and arranging them in a way that gave the audience a flavour for the film yet did not tell them enough to make sense of why she “had was described as a perfect life”, or why she thinks “perfect’s such an overused word”.

Radio Trailer

The inclusion of a release date in our ancillary texts will allow people to know when our film is released and thus allow people to watch our product. Furthermore the inclusion of factual information such as director strengthens the synergy between the products publicising the product as part of a group for example it is introduced as “from the director of the film ‘Lucky’”. This indicates that if you enjoyed the film ‘Lucky’ you will enjoy our film ‘Nameless’.

Radio Trailer

Where we would distribute the ancillary texts would also have an effect on their effectiveness as a contributor to the main product. The locations and companies that will distribute the ancillary products are also very important to help publicise the main product and send the messages that we want. We feel that they would be placed in a magazines and played on radio stations that have the same of a similar target audience that we have.

Examples of these would be Heat magazine and BBC Radio One. This would in turn allow the target audience to discover our product and help sell the film to our desired audience. Also, having the film featured on such platforms would give the film certain credentials as they are popular with our target audience.

Distribution

To appeal to our target audience, our main product is both shot and edited in an unconventional way. The start of our film uses quick jump cuts in order to increase the pace of the film and maintain interest throughout the monologue. This works in the same way that our radio trailer uses quick short sounds bites in order to achieve the same effect.

This helps to appeal to our target audience by being different to many other films set on the same topic, publishing our film to the target audience by being relatively unique and unorthodox.

The Film