Evaluation (2) - How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

Any successful feature film is accompanied with appropriate and carefully planned promotion. In our combination of trailer, poster, and magazine cover, our most prominent goal was to vary the content, but to have sufficient links and devices so that a potential audience would associate our tasks with eachother.

This cohesion is essential to successful promotion.

Both our main task and ancillary tasks bear similarities and share devices that create an effective 'brand'.

Our magazine front cover took inspiration from established magazines such as EMPIRE:

The concept of having a background image, with auxiliary elements such as titles, subheadings, pictures, captions, barcodes, and other promotions intertwined, is the most common format, and as such we decided to use it.

Our poster, as seen above, follows a similar format. It features the protagonist with a gun against a red brick wall. She sustains a direct mode of address and the auxiliary elements form a ring around her. The darkness, and strong colours, combined with her address and possession of a weapon are striking but not threatening to the viewer. I think we could have added more content, and tidied up the colour scheme to go with the background image.

The poster, designed mainly by Tristam, carries similar themes. The films' logo remains the same, as does the colour red. Red plays to nature's instinctive warnings -- it indicates that there is some form of danger here. The reviews and informational text at the bottom add professionalism and act as a point of authority for the viewer. It becomes attractive and reliably endorsed.

The stormy sky was rendered in Adobe Photoshop, and the red-hued and wind-battered cityscape was a photo taken by Tristam and subsequently modified in Photoshop. It suggests the setting of the film (London) but is tainted by blood. In fact, in earlier drafts of the poster, we used blood as a vivid feature, but we decided against it.

There is, however, no direct mode of address, and the image is not very provocative. This is something I think we would change, were we to do this again. There is also a very visible division between the black background and the centre image, which looks visually odd.

Having said this, these elements are tied integrally to the equivalents in the magazine front cover, creating cohesion and uniformity.

Using conventional elements such as guns, and representative shots such as running, shooting, and authoritative speech shots in the trailer, we made it clear that we were working in the gangster genre. In all three of the tasks, we use the same outfit for the main character to objectify and isolate her from the rest of the tasks.