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

By Jodie-Leigh Barnham

Creating Ancillary TextsAncillary texts are extremely important in the process of creating a film. They can act as effective means of advertisement and promotion for your media product. Although there are many mediums of promotion for a film, we completed a poster and a radio trailer. This covered the promotion of both visual and auditory elements of our film.Creating the ancillary texts would be particularly easy. We relied on the treatment we created, even though this did change slightly through-out production. We were all clear about the genre, the overall tone and the message of our film. So, creating our ancillary texts would not be difficult.In our main production, we were trying to create a tone of suspense and surprise to the audience. Also, we intended to even make them question their own morals. Therefore, we had to consider this when creating our ancillary texts.

Creating the PosterI looked at posters of the same genre and decided to look at features that they commonly included. I wanted to have a base for my initial idea so I took into account things such as the type of font, commonly used colours and subconscious images.If I could find basic conventions that are used I would be able to create a sufficient base for my initial poster idea.Posters are a particularly effective form of promotion as they wide a wide form of presentation. They can be shown in many places such as buses, town centres, cinemas, galleries, billboards, etc. The broadness of where you can post them can conclude in enticing a larger audience. This is because posters aren’t just in places for a target audience, such as putting them in cinemas to target common cinema attenders, they are put out in every day places such as billboards or even bus stops. I believe that because our film is of a psychological sub-genre, we can entice an audience with the poster as the less that we actually show the better. It then encourages the audience to already begin to piece our plot together, which is something that I think we should achieve.

Billboard poster for psychological thriller, Shutter Island

Poster ExamplesThrough valid websites such as IMDb and Empire, I looked at other examples of posters from thriller films, particularly psychological thrillers.

The ones I found particularly effective were the psychological thrillers, which I evaluated.

Creating Our Poster

After submitting our brief sketches of the poster, we decided on a design and took the final picture. We decided not to take a still from the film as we felt like there wasn’t a shot in the film that gave the right amount of information out about the film to the audience that fit with our overall idea for the poster. After taking the perfect picture, after taking into consideration all of my research on posters from our genre, I gave my ideas for the final poster.This is the poster we created:

We decided on putting this in because when we looked at other thrillers, they tended to mention other similar texts to appeal to a fan-base and created more attention to the film.

We used to star rating scale review as this is also a simple and common occurrence on most film posters.

We decided to use a review from a trusted source that focuses on film to justify the review to the audience.

I found common colours used in posters are darker colour and then a contrast such as red so we included this.

We used the antagonist from our film in the poster. To use a character could grip the eye of the audience and leave them wondering who that character is.

Steel tongs font was used like any conventional poster for practically any genre of film. The font was a grey to blend to the environment as it wasn’t the focal point of the poster.

We used a sharp font and cold colour to make the title of the film stand out and represent the seriousness of the Employer himself.

As a tagline, we used a quote from the radio trailer to tie the 2 ancillary texts together. The quote is also based on the monologue in the final scene in the film.

Blood to indicate and foreshadow danger/death to the audience and stand out against the background.

Overall Poster EvaluationAfter considering elements of conventional psychological thriller posters, over all, I feel that the poster that we finalised is effective for our film.

I believe that through the use of dark colours and fonts it symbolises the genre. The subtleties in the poster such as the blood splatter on the floor and the gun on the table indicate the underlying dangerous tones of our film to the audience. It also appeals to an audience that enjoy films involving these elements.

There are also elements of the poster that foreshadow happenings in the film. For example, the shadow on the wall creates the shape of someone praying, such like Kyle panicking for his life in the confrontation scene. It also relates to the shadow on the wall created in the final scene just before Kyle is killed. There are definite psychological elements in the poster that I picked up on in other psychological thriller posters that are left for the audience to notice and figure out their relevance.

Radio Trailer

Radio is one of the oldest forms of entertainment as is still relevant today. As of 2012, there are an estimated 700 radio stations in the UK. A numerous amount of these are owned by the BBC who do not advertise as they are funded mainly by what people pay for their TV Licences. Radio trailers are another effective way of marketing and promoting a media product. Radio trailers only involve the auditory elements of a film, so the idea would be to attempt to use all the sound clips and audio that would give enough information about a film to attract an audience, without giving too much away and enticing an audience to want to watch that film. Although these aren’t a commonly known medium of advertising, it is still particularly effective as it can target different environments such as being in a car, at home or even in an office/work environment.

Radio Trailer Research

I found that radio trailers are reasonably hard to find in comparison to other forms of marketing such as trailers or posters. This is because with trailer you can process them into a format where you can watch and replay them through websites such as YouTube. Posters are meant to be visually shared. So, as well as IMDb and other official film databases, they can be found through even a simple Google Image search.Therefore, I feel that a radio trailer would be more difficult to format into something you can find as there is nothing aesthetically pleasing and would be harder to produce so they were almost impossible to search for using the internet. Even after being informed about searching on Vimeo, I struggled.

Radio Trailer ResearchI decided that the best way to try and hear a radio trailer, would simply be to listen to the radio when doing everyday things and hope to hear them. I decided not to listen to any BBC radio stations as they don’t advertise so I wouldn’t hear any this way.After listening for a while I begin to hear trailers for particularly action/thriller films and eventually started to identify to conventions of radio trailers.I learnt that overall they tend to have quotes in from the film, sounds, sound effects and music. They also had a voiceover that would usually say the name of the film and then its release date and/or rating. With this I began to mind map and plan ideas for our radio trailer.My idea was that it would be particularly effective if we did something quite unconventional of a typical radio trailer, instead of just having direct quotes from the film and the voice over explain what the film was about, I thought we could have the antagonist talk to the audience.This would be effective as you could link and identify with a character in the film. It also means that as an audience member you are much like Kyle for a lot of the film who isn’t aware of the identity of the Employer and has to work it out for himself. The monologue said in the radio trailer would be a lot like the monologue in the film except the audience would change from Kyle, to the audience listening. Direct quotes, sounds and music would also be used in the film to add thrill, intensity and insert the element of danger.This is quite an eerie idea and I felt that it would create that intense atmosphere and prove that the film would be this way, too.

Final Radio TrailerThe link to the radio trailer that we created for ‘The Employer’ can be found here.We recorded the monologue on a Zoom Recorder. When I wrote the monologue included direct questions and statements like:• ‘Isn’t it funny, the decisions we make?’• ‘…marriage, jobs, kids’I included these because I feel that the question is direct to the audience and gets them listening. To mention the list of three is something relatable for an audience and then gives them something to identify with and engage to.I chose to insert the sound of the Employer and other people shouting and gun shots to insert the convention of thrillers and implement a dangerous element. I also chose to use the music direct from the film as an identifier that also happens to create efficient tension in the radio trailer. Because the radio trailer can’t rely on visuals I included all of these elements to successfully give out the right atmosphere and to the audience to represent our film in the right way.I also stood to radio trailer convention and recorded a separate voice over saying the name of the film and its release date to let the audience know details of the film and when they will be able to see it as extra information that wasn’t made available on the poster.

Conclusion of Ancillary Texts

I feel that overall the ancillary texts that we created were effective in promoting our film. I feel that they represent and compliment the ideas that we were trying to portray and identified the atmosphere and thoughts behind the film. As a whole all of the products that we created present how dedicated we were to this film and show the different ways in which we can represent our creativity and ideas. They give the right information out about the film to entice an audience, but without giving too much away at the same time.