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

My ancillary followed typical conventions of psychological thriller as well as our main product, involving the use of colour schemes, fonts, and mystery. Our main production illustrated the suspense that is normally produced within a thriller, allowing our audience to sympathise with this genre and our main production. We also used similar aspects - involved in our main production – that we would also use within the ancillary texts as well. This consisted of the stereotypes of mentally ill individuals always being violent and aggressive. This worked well when involving this aspect as it was easily conveyed in both a poster, double page spread, and our main production. This was done, mainly through lighting, as we used dim and dark lighting when portraying our main character. For example, In the scene where our main character kills the bully, we filmed this in a very dimly lit alleyway with restricted lighting to heighten the horror and to create the urge to see more; I used the same convention of light in my double page spread by having a pure black background and white and red font and pictures from this scene to create a similarity between the main product and ancillary texts.

However, it is more effective and beneficial when getting inspiration from texts such as magazines, newspapers etc. as there are more products that connote the themes of psychological thrillers that vary between what they want. So they are specific enough in their conventions to be unique from other products but follow the same typical themes of psychological thrillers. With short films this didn’t really occur as they are all very similar and use the conventions but with a different storyline. This is not helpful when using these short films to inspire us on different ideas and camera shots as they are all too relatable.

We repeated scenes but with mild changes in order to present the themes of suspense, following conventions of psychological thrillers as it holds a basic narrative until the end, putting dramatic emphasis on the finishing scenes. This same idea was put towards my ancillary texts when creating

my posters and double page spreads, by keeping the simplicity to make it look creepy and eerie. I wanted to involve similar conventions in both my main production and ancillary tasks as they equally need to connote the themes of psychological thriller to attract audiences who like this type of media.

I used a black background as I thought this would increase the use of thriller conventions as it is quite a serious colour and connotes the depression and melancholy the character is feeling. This is backed up through the images of my main character sitting in a toilet cubical with his head in his arms, with his posture

signifying his depressive state. The focussed lighting and the use of shadows on the other picture enhances the mystery and suspense that is also included in our main production. We intended to incorporate the main themes presented in our main production similarly within our ancillary. This was done as I felt strongly over the Importance of advertisement and promotion of our main product through these texts, such as double page spread, and poster. Audiences would be able to identify the type of themes that would be presented in the short film through the conventions in our ancillary texts.