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

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

For our poster and magazine cover we have had to ensure that they promote our trailer and film together through the use of synergy. This meant that the poster and magazine cover had to have a constant theme in relation to the trailer, for example we had to match colours, images and text so that our target audience would easily be able to link one of our texts to the others. 

We started by finding a text that we thought matched the genre of our film and we then proceeded to edit this by adding red for more effect. This text was then placed at the end of our trailer to leave the image in the audiences mind. After this we created our poster and magazine cover and carried the text across to both platforms.  This meant that the text was synonymous with our film.

We ensured that the actors/ models across our texts were dressed and made-up the same. This meant that they had the same make-up, for example blood and skin tone in the poster and magazine cover, the blood was dark and the cuts were very visual. They stood out so that the audience would recognise the genre of our film. The grey skin tone that all of the models had was to inform the audience that they were ‘undead’. We brought this blood and gore back through the trailer giving the audience glimpses of zombies and blood.

The colours we used throughout were also matched. In the trailer we tried to create dark edges around the image to add horror to the video. We realized the trailer didn’t include much action so we added the darkness to show the genre of the film. This darkness was carried across to the poster and magazine in the images we used. The magazine cover had two zombies climbing the stairs with darkness surrounding them, whilst the poster had one zombie also surrounded by darkness.

The three texts were all made to feel very lonely. The trailer focused around the main character trying to escape a zombie apocalypse, not showing any life around him, the poster then showed just one zombie with the magazine showing two more. This made the audience realize the film did have emotion behind it but at the same time caused tension for them as they wondered whether the main character would escape. This theme also put them in the protagonists shoes and made them wonder how it would feel to be in that world.