How effective is the combination of your main product and the

ancillary texts?

Annie Roebuck

Ancillary TextsAn ancillary text is vital in the process of distributing a film. It is a way of appealing to a wider audience because the audience is the main importance. Otherwise the film industry just wouldn’t be as successful as it is. We had to create two ancillary texts to appeal to the audience we have chosen to aim our film towards. The audience being under 30 but 16+ and fans of a good thriller film. The products had to, obviously, be about the film we created but to not let anyone know too much information. It needed to be as secretive as the characters involved.Although we had many forms of advertising to choose from, we chose to create a poster for advertisement and a radio trailer as our ancillary textsWe knew just what to involve, after some research, in our ancillary texts to appeal to a wider audience.

PosterPosters can be extremely effective in that they can appeal to a larger audience. They can be seen in bus stops, cinemas, online, billboards, shops and other public places. There is a vast amount of different people going to these places therefore it is imperative to get a poster just right to catch a potential viewers keen eye.

I chose to look at posters from similar thriller films in order to get an idea of what poster to create. This meant looking at title fonts, colour schemes, graphics and photographs used. Even taglines because a tagline is vital to the advertising of the film on the poster. It is, after all, the only words you can use to almost ‘sell’ the film to an audience.

I looked at posters for films such as ‘Pulp Fiction’ and ‘The Godfather’ for inspiration and to analyse.

From looking a posters on Blogger I realised that many of them have small aspects in common. These are the aspects that I wanted to take into consideration when planning and designing my own poster. I feel that my most in depth analysis was of the ‘Pulp Fiction’ poster. I looked into when the poster was released and what contributing aspects complete the poster to make it as successful as it was.

This is a screenshot of the analysis I completed on the blog we created.

Here, I have said that when a film has huge stars and co-stars in the movie, they tend to list their names.

We are creating our film as if to be an independent movie so there wouldn’t be any big names in it so this is something we wouldn’t do on our poster.

So after analysing posters I then needed to create my own as an ancillary text.

This is the poster that I designed for the final poster. The text is large and blotchy to indicate that the situation that The Employer is in or is to put another in, is a big situation that has a negative aspect involved.

I included the most important parts of the film on the poster such as the walking stick, the box and The Employer himself. His face is blank to indicate to an audience that he must remain anonymous. The box is blazing because it is the object that brings Kyle and The Employer together in the film and is important because of that.

At the bottom of the poster I have included the regulation of the film; A 15. This is based on the basic BBFC censorship guidelines.

This is a basic sketch and not the final poster.

The PosterThe photograph we used was taken in The Employers ‘office’ from the film. We had him hiding his face in order to create the anonymity I wanted to create in the poster I sketched.

We tried to include a small amount of religious connotations in the poster. The first being that The Employers hand is held up, like he’s almost praying for whatever reason. His shadow looks extremely large and we wanted to create this effect due to it almost being a god-like image. It also has a sense of foreboding due to the shadow effect being used when Kyle is murdered at the end of the film.

We created a reference to the last film we made at the top of the poster which is something that is done frequently so that audiences can say that, if they liked the previous film, they might like this one.

Another thing we included was a tagline. The Tagline is a line from the other ancillary text we created; radio trailer. Using this gives the audience to bring the two ancillary texts together because they’ll recognise the line.

This, we all agreed, would be an independent film so due to this we have created comments from famous film magazines and large cinemas. This is a way to attract a larger audience.

The regulation of the film was put on to create the look of an authentic film poster. All film posters have the certificate on because otherwise, they wouldn’t look like a

genuine film poster.

Evaluation of the film poster

Personally, I like the film poster we all created as a group. I think it has the thriller look which we all wanted to create. Obviously it wouldn’t be successful if the poster said fantasy and we showed an audience a thriller film so due to this reason It definitely works.

I think the poster could have been improved by changing the amount of stars each company had ‘given’ the film because then, I feel, it would have looked more genuine. I like that at the top of the poster there is the reference to the previous film we created in last years studies. This brings the two films together and audiences will recognise this.

I think that the poster we created is similar to The Godfather poster on that it is a very dark, very secretive poster. They both contain the same themes such as suites, anonymity, darkness and basically, no information.

Radio TrailerRadio trailers can be also be extremely effective in that they can appeal to a larger audience; like a poster can. They can be heard on a variety of different radio stations. There is a vast amount of different people listening to the vast amount of radio trailers there is. The radio can be listened to anywhere; In the car, at home, on a mobile device. This is a way of advertising to people in their own comfortable surroundings.

It is a very secretive way of advertising in that audiences don’t know that they’re being advertised anything because they’ll think they're just listening to the radio.

To research radio trailers, I had to listen out when listening to the radio to see what kind of films are getting advertised. It became clear that this was very hard to do because there are many other advertisements on the radio.

When it came to designing my own radio trailer I found that it was difficult to write about when there is no visual evidence so on my Blogger post I just basically explain what it could be like.

The writing at the bottom in italics is what I wanted the voiceover to briefly say. It is short and snappy and straight to the point. This is the tagline I would have like on the poster too. As a group we mixed all our ideas together and came to a final decision. I liked that me and my group can work well as a team and decide what would be best for our production.

We all thought it’d be a good idea to involve The Employer in the radio trailer and have him talking about the revenge that he is about to commit against Kyle and we all planned this speech together.

The final radio trailer can be heard here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-nQ_7Ie1Vk

We put a black page with a title over it so that any audience members wanting to listen to this radio trailer, can, knowing what it is and what it is for. I think the audience will listen to this trailer and understand the film, it’s genre and what is to come in the film. I think that the audience aren’t revealed too much about the film and they’ll be pleasantly surprised after watching the film. I like that throughout the trailer there is links and a sense of foreboding as to what is due to come in the film.

Radio is a brilliant way to advertise the audience because, as I have previously stated, they will not know they are being advertised to. They’ll hear this trailer and maybe think they want to see it, maybe they’ll think they won’t. But either way, they’ll know about it.

Ancillary textsOverall, I believe that ancillary texts are the perfect way to attract an audience to a film. They reach a large number of people in a large number of ways. Posters and radio trailers are the two forms of advertising that reach the vast majority of potential audience members and for that reason, I think we have succeeded in completing two ancillary texts.