Monday, 14 March 2011

How Effective Is The Combination Of Your Main Product And Ancillary Texts?

Together, my horror movie teaser trailer, promotional poster, and movie magazine cover constitute as a promotional package. These are used to promote the movies in advance of their release,
There are two different types of trailer: A theatrical trailer, and a teaser trailer. A theatrical trailer is usually fairly long in duration, and greatly emphasises the protagonist and the story. It is from this trailer, that most opinions are based. A teaser trailer on the other hand is used to create anticipation, and are often promoted via word of mouth, or online sites such as Facebook and Youtube.


As well as the trailers, film posters are also made for advertising. They are placed where a large amount of people can see them, in order to promote the film. Such places to find the posters include: Billboards, bus stops and online places such as IMDB.

Our trailer is intriguing, as it sets up one character, seemingly to be the protagonist, but is then killed and replaced by another character. This 'plot twist' is also typical of the horror genre, and will hook the audience, as the want to know the circumstances in which she died.

I feel my poster, inspired by the teaser trailer for Friday 13th is successful in attracting a audience. The character in the center of the picture, although not the protagonist, creates an air of mystery, and intrigue. Her body language suggests something is wrong, and he posture is at of a model from a music box. The shadows and darkness are typical of the horror genre, and so effectively convey the genre of the film.


I decided to keep the poster simple, as to highlight the main points of the poster: The name of the film, the slogan, and release date. My poster has traits of both a teaser poster (The limited information), but also that of a promotional poster (the billing block). I cam up with the slogan 'What will you do when the music stops', to again create an air of mystery, and the idea of consequence. It also connotes a 'fear of the unknown', common within the horror genre. This is also a rhetorical question, which is a great advertising device, as it leaves the audience thinking about the question, and then passing on the intrigue via word of mouth. The billing block at the bottom of the poster conforms to the general style, and conveys the same information as a professional poster would, including actors, director, writers, producers etc.

The magazine cover is used to promote the movie, with other promotional material such as interviews. When researching magazine covers, I decide I would base my cover on 'Empire'
For my magazine, I decided to go with a black and white style, to promote that the film is partially set in the 1940's. To also connote that style, I used the font 'Courier New', as this is the typeface of a typewriter.

1 comment:

  1. This is too thin. First of all you need to explain how film promotion happens; i.e. the role of the film distributor in creating and marketing plan which will include advertising, publicity, and promotion. Then you need to explain how to products you have created which are advertising - i.e. the trailer and the poster - work together to create a coherent single advertising image for the film. The film magazine cover would not be controlled by the distributor. It is an example of favourable publicity that a distributor would hope to generate. Therefore your comments about using black-and-white on the cover because the film is set in the past is inappropriate because the magazine publisher would not be interested in advertising your film in this way, only in attracting the target audience of the magazine at point of sale. What you can do is explain how publisher tries to generate such favourable publicity. Information on this can be found on the launchingfilms website.

    ReplyDelete