Evaluation - How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary tasks?

For this A2 coursework, I had to create a promotional package for a film. The main product of this promotional package was a film trailer, and the two ancillary tasks my group chose to complete were creating a poster and website for the film. These three tasks had to work well together to create a cohesive promotional package which would be effective in its aim of making people aware of the film and its genre, and getting them to pay to see the film in cinemas.

In the creation of these tasks, we researched into the conventions of film trailers, posters, and websites to make sure our audience was aware of what the product was that we were promoting, as the familiar format of trailers, posters, and websites, are recognised by viewers. After researching into conventions, we made plans of how the tasks would look. The plans we produced for the trailer included a script, shot list, and storyboards, using these as guidelines throughout shooting and editing the trailer. Broadly, we followed these plans well but also allowed ourselves some freedom in making our trailer rather than strictly following our plans. For example, the shots in our trailer are sometimes in a different order than in the script, shot list, and storyboards in order to conform more to trailer conventions of shots being out of narrative order.  Contrastingly, we stuck more closely to our plans for our poster and website, which were mind maps of ideas for the site and poster designs and what both would contain. Our website’s pages are the same as those included in our plan, and both have dark designs composed primarily of blacks and greys as those are conventional of posters and websites for horror films.



The main image of our antagonist from the poster and our antagonist in the trailer.

I believe that our main product and ancillary tasks work well together, and clearly look as if they are part of the same promotional package. Our poster’s main image is a close up of our antagonist, and our trailer ends on a close up of this character, strongly establishing a link between the two. This character is probably the most recognisable and eye-catching one featured in the trailer due to her supernatural qualities, and so it made sense to put her, not a different character, on our poster. She is wearing the same costume in the trailer and poster, which links the two together even more. In addition to this, the poster is entirely in black and white apart from the red ribbon in our antagonist’s hair, which is identical to the shot composition of the beginning of our trailer which, by using Pinnacle editing software to make our shots 80% monochrome, is also black and white apart from our antagonist’s distinctive red ribbon. This links our poster to both the beginning and end of our trailer, meaning people will not just associate the poster with one part of the trailer. This is very good as the two halves of our trailer are clearly separated by being set in the past and the future, and being in black and white and colour respectively.

This title is featured in our trailer and on both of our ancillary tasks, anchoring them to the same promotional package.

Our website is also linked strongly to the other parts of our promotional package; for example, it has the film’s trailer on its home page. The colour scheme of the website is conventional to the horror genre and conforms to both our trailer and poster by being primarily black and white, and featuring some red, in the form of our production company logo and the colour of the text in the film’s logo. The background of our website and poster are very similar, as they are both black backgrounds, conforming to genre conventions.

The colour schemes of our website and trailer are made up primarily of black and white, with some red.

Overall, I think that the combination of our main product and ancillary tasks is effective, and I think that people who view the promotional package would know all aspects of it were advertising the same film. It would be possible to sell the film on what we have created, as all aspects of the promotional package adhere to conventions of real life media products. When we showed the trailer to a focus group, everyone asked said they would pay to watch the film, meaning that the trailer alone will be enough to sell the film to most people. With the addition of the two ancillary tasks, our promotional package would definitely attract audiences, especially since horror is a cult genre with a devoted following.