How effective is the combination of your main production and ancillary texts?
Our ancillary tasks were to produce a film poster and a magazine cover. In industry there wouldn’t actually be a link between the film poster and the magazine cover unless they were both owned by the same conglomerate such as Twentieth century fox productions and Sky’s subscriber magazine. However, we did still create continuity between the ancillary tasks and our production.
There are a number of different ways in which we created continuity between the ancillary tasks and final production. Although, there could have been more factors used to create a greater effect.
We created both the poster and magazine cover on photoshop elements. I am pleased we used this programme as this is what they use in industry which makes it easier for us to produce products similar to those produced in industry.
My research showed me that a teaser poster is used to slowly build awareness of your film to the audience. We used a single image of the protagonist from behind with a cocktail glass with blood dripping from it in her hand to do this. We also highlighted the colour red in our teaser poster by having a black and white image but having the protagonists dress and hair red. We did this as we didn't want to confuse the audience into thinking it was of the rom-com genre as the title ' a Date from hell' could be a bit misleading. Once the poster for the film comes out there is more information on it such as various images, release date and reviews. From this the audience should be able to tell the genre and maybe guess at aspects of the narrative.
Firstly, we created a poster that had the original image from our teaser poster on it with added stills from our trailer down the side. (http://johnson-lucya2.blogspot.com/2009/12/poster.html)
However, after reflecting on this we decided it wasn’t produced to the best of our ability with the photoshop skills used as the stills down the side weren’t cut out very neatly which made the poster look very amateur. Even though having the same image on the teaser poster and poster creates continuity and once the audience has seen the teaser poster and then the poster they may recognise the image and remember the film, we decided to start the poster afresh.
The image on our poster is a photo of the protagonist taking a photo of the group that meet in the bar. As you cant see the protagonists face, just the back of her hair, this creates narrative enigma for the audience. This also links into the teaser poster as you can only see her face from the side which the audience will recognise. We chose to use this picture as it links into the title of our film ‘A date from Hell’ as you audience will notice that the set up of the characters in the bar is similar to what will happen on an actual date. Going on dates is a common thing which the audience can relate to, which adds to the scariness of our production as the protagonist appears to be a normal teenager at the beginning of the trailer but then turns in to be a murder which is unexpected and brings it closer to home for the audience as next time they go on a date it could make them worry and think twice about the person they are meeting.
The images on the poster connote both violence and sex from the signifiers from the knife and the eyes and sex is signified from the actresses dressing provocatively in tight, revealing clothes. Both of these themes link into the narrative of the film.
Even though the knife and eyes connote the horror genre we could have anchored this more by having a picture of the protagonist from a low angle to make her look more powerful and domineering or a picture of the victims faces looking terrified. However, not being able to see the protagonists face creates narrative enigma and the audience hopefully will pick up on this and wonder why she is the only character who you can’t see and why she hasn’t been invited into the photo as she is the one taking the photo.
We decided that the BBFC would rate our film a ‘15’ which is featured on the poster. We decided it would be a 15 for the reasons of it including scenes of a sexual nature and intentional violence without humour. The BBFC is the national governing body for films released for public consumption in the UK and Northern Ireland. Also, our research showed us similar horror films within this genre are also rated ‘15’ such as Prom Night, Donkey punch and Sorority Row.
(This poster has similarities to ours as it is all girls and is predominantly girls, some of there faces look scared while some look confident which connotes the variety in character types, the burning house in the background gives anchorage to the setting, the film is being released on September 11th which is an important day in America)We chose to have reviews from Kingdom, which is the magazine we created, The Sun as our potential youth, lower class audience may also read The Sun therefore agree with how they describe our film and it may make them go see it. http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/showbiz/film/
We also had a review from Jonathon Ross to appeal to a wider audience as this would appeal to the middle class older audience as he is a typical ‘BBC’ middle class, well spoken character.
Originally, we thought our poster should just have the photo of the group in the bar although, after showing this to our potential audience we realised the audience would most probably not associate it with the horror genre so we added the photos of the eyes and knife. The poster without the knife and eyes could have been successful as a teaser poster but not for the real poster so I am glad we showed it to our potential audience and received their feedback to amend this.
The initial magazine cover was a still from the trailer of the protagonist looking upset. (http://johnson-lucya2.blogspot.com/2010/02/film-magazine-front-covers.html)
Similar to the initial poster, the magazine didn’t look professional so we decided to do another copy of that too. I continued my research and found that it is uncommon for magazines to have a still from the film as there photo so I am glad I decided to do the magazine cover again.
We wanted the face of the protagonist to stand out so the image of her face dominants the picture and it is also centred on the magazine cover, which is a common code and convention. The title of our film was also a key feature to the magazine so we put this in a large red font to stand out against the black background and red is also a colour which people link to Horrors. We decided to have our magazine a purely horror magazine which was shown by the font used to write Kingdom (we downloaded the font from http://simplythebest.net/fonts/ as we wanted a font that portrayed horror which this one did) and the tagline reads ‘the ultimate horror magazine’. We chose to have it as a purely horror magazine so it links into the well known horror magazine ‘Fangoria’.
On the poster and magazine cover the font used to write ‘a Date from Hell’ is the same on both of them and they are also of a similar size. They both also feature heavily red writing and both images are on a black background. On the poster the magazine ‘Kingdom’ has also been quoted which creates continuity.
We could have created continuity more by having the same image on both the poster and magazine cover, however doing this would have made it more difficult to show off our photo shop skills but it may have made it easier for our audience to recognise the film.
The video above visually shows the parts of photoshop that we used to create our magazine cover and poster.
the video above visually shows the links between the ancillary tasks and our final trailer which i talked about above.
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