Wednesday, 9 March 2011

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

All together, my horror movie trailer, poster and magazine cover make a promotional package. My magazine cover and poster are there to promote my film to audiences. My film is based on a cursed music box which is involved with family history of the main protagonistt. Although the music box is the key feature, there is also a theme of water throughout the trailer, which implies to the audience that there is in somewhat way a connection between the music box and water.

A trailer is not the only way in which a film can be promoted. A horror poster is able to advertise the film, and then be placed anywhere for audiences to notice it. I also decided that promoting my film on one of the biggest film magazines in the country would allow its fan base, which would contain a lot of my target audience, to notice the film, leading them to possibly go watch it. This would result in my movie being advertised to a large demographic.

However, the trailer, poster and magazine as a package must be strong, and must all link in somewhat way to ensure that they engage the largest possible audience. At the beginning of my trailer, we see an unknown character drowning herself underwater for an unknown reason. I believe this helps to create an abstract sense from the very start.



On my poster I had the same
character from the beginning of the trailer looking through a window, but with her face very darkened. This was a low key image that would imply a sense of secrecy and to hide her identity and her role within my trailer. I particularly like the image featured on my poster as it is not a spoiler for my trailer, and does not reveal any content about the film. On the poster I decided to create a tagline which would follow the film, and for this I chose “sleep in heavenly peace?” I thought this worked particularly well as the music box tune from within my trailer was the tune of ‘Silent Night.’ I thought this would link the poster and trailer together further. I placed the production values of cast names at the top of my poster to enable them to be clear and to stand out to my target audience. I also made sure my font was a much brighter colour than the poster as the image and background of my poster were very dark and dingy.

On the other hand, my magazine cover , which is another section of publicity, was very different to my movie poster, yet they were still in link with one another. I researched many Empire movie magazines to see what types of images were shown on the front covers. Most of the images were studio shots of the cast, gaining an even higher production value to their film. I decided to do the same for mine, and I photographed the same character that appeared on the poster of my film, which perhaps was very opposite to my poster as here we are able to see her perfectly. I chose Empire to be the magazine that I would advertise my film on as it is one of the biggest movie magazines within the UK and would definitely promote my film excellently as it has a very committed audience. I chose to place screen-shots of my trailer on the front cover so that my target audience would be able to recognise parts of the trailer as my magazine image was not a film shot. I tried to situate my text in a bold way so that it stood out to the audience, still implying it was a horror by the use of the world ‘monster.’ I also chose not to over focus on other films as I wanted my film to be the main aspect of Empire’s front cover of the week.

This is how I would choose Empire's magazine to look if I was personally designing it. However, I understand that if my film was going to be distributed in real life, I would have no control over this, and the decisions would be made by Empire's company.  However when creating my poster, the decisions would be made by me as this is the poster from my own company, advertising only my film. However Empire would play a marketing tool, and would help me to advertise my film to my target audience.

By using Empire as the magazine in which my movie would be advertised on, it enables the magazine to gain more publicity for people choosing to watch my film. When others buy the magazine for other stories within, there is also a high chance they will also read my story.

1 comment:

  1. It is a tagline not a slogan. This is good but it needs to be situated in an understanding of how moving marketing works, and the role of the distributor. What is the difference between advertising, publicity and promotion? How does a distributor try to generate the sort of publicity that the front cover of Empire magazine brings? If you could just situate your answer in some institutional knowledge in this way it would be a good one. By the way I think that your top 10 new movies cover line on your magazine is a) rather a weak one and b) should be justified on the right. Perhaps you would like to come to study extension time and we can fix it together?

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