Evalutation Activity 2

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

'The three ancillary texts we produced for our advanced portfolio for our A2 media studies course was a teaser trailer, a magazine front cover and a film poster. These three types of media help to advertise and market a film which is due to be released.
The teaser trailer is one of the first things to be released, so is therefore relativley short and vaugue. It does, however, leave questions that the audience will want answered. For example, with the hands coming out and retracting in the bath leaves the audeince wondering who she is. This links nicely to the magazine front cover, on which the ghost is the main image, so the audience may believe the article will contain some sort of spoiler or clues as to who she is. The viewers will also be able to relate the two because the film's title 'Lost Soul' is on the cover as well as in the trailer.
In each of the media texts, we focused on a different part of the film. The trailer focused mainly on the grounds of Alcott Manor as this is where the horror of the film happens and is the most visual, giving the audience the chance to put themselves in the position of the group of friends. The poster focuses on the fictional Alcott Manor. By doing this, it is a generic convention of horror films because of the haunted house. The simple picture with the darkened background doesn't give many details away, which will keep the audience guessing. The tagline also makes the audience interested because it directly addresses them by saying 'Watch Your Back'. The Empire magazine cover focuses on the antagonist in the film. The dark colour scheme helps convey the disturbing horror genre. Together, each of these convey the generic conventions of a horror film.
An improvement on all three could be having an image which is repeated on each media text, which would help the audience associate all three. Such as the bloody hand print on the poster, if we had put this in the trailer and on the magazine front cover in one way or another, it would have been a continuing theme to directly link the three together.'

Another way to directly link all three ancillary texts could have been to have one continuing image throughout, similar to a tag line but in a visual format. For instance, using the bloody hand as a logo and showing it in various ways in all three media texts.
Our trailer was skewed to an audience between the ages of 15-24, mostly males, who are the prominant consumers of horrors. This was reinforced through the magazine front cover by using typically male characters, instead of feminine shades such as pink and purple. The film poster is less gender orientated as it is simply showing the flim. The audience, whether male or female, will associate the imagery, such as the dark skies and bloody hand, with the horror genre.