How effective is the combination of your main text

and ancillary texts?

Existing Marketing Campaigns At the beginning of the A2 coursework when we were researching into some of the marketing campaigns of films two that was particularly interesting was the Warm Bodies and the CloverField campaign in which both took very different approaches into marketing films. Firstly, Warm Bodies stuck to the traditional forms of marketing a film through a film teaser trailer, poster and magazines. Whereas CloverField took to film marketing slightly different to other films. In which, they created fake MySpace accounts and created short videos to express the concern that people would have for the ‘monster’, furthermore from this the marketing campaign also included the use of producing websites to relate to the film's universe. CloverField also used themes as one of the marketing campaigns as it was described as a monster movie for the YouTube generation.

From looking at these campaigns it enabled our group to look at the different ways of which you can market a film that has a lot of basis from the internet and how the web can make a significant difference to the response you will get from your film. Some of the most important elements to the marketing campaign are the brand identity, font, theme, how it suggests the film's narrative as well as the idea of how it is going to target your potential audience.

Brand Identity In relation to the brand identity that we wanted to create, the visual elements such as graphics, colours, character images and taglines we wanted to keep them continuous throughout the whole marketing campaign. One of the most noticeable visual element that is significantly keeping with the brand identity was the graphics of the film title, ‘The Following’ has the same font and the same colours, this is because an audience will be able to link them together as well as give the professional look of a film. Another aspect of the poster and magazine that is part of the brand identity is the character image that is used for both parts of the campaign, again this plays an important part of the brand identity as for an audience this will enable the audience to remember the character and then link it to the teaser trailer.

The technical features that we have included to some extent show a clear message across our product in which both of the products suggest the same genre, this is because both have the same eerie, tense theme throughout. As the main character is looking straight at the camera and is surrounded in the woods could suggest that something strange is happening and that he is possibly being followed from the small images of someone behind the main character. Furthermore from this, both of the products suggest the same narrative themes this is because they both have the main character central in the shot with the idea of him being followed. On the other hand in the magazine it doesn't show the small images of someone following him, instead there is icons of the other characters on the right hand side of the page suggesting that they may be involved.

Brand IdentityBoth of the products represent the characters and possibly places in similar ways, this is because in the poster and magazine, they support the idea that he is being followed, in which the main character that is shown on the poster and magazine is the most seen character in the teaser trailer, However in relation to the woods that is being shown, this isn't seen as much in the teaser trailer in which may not represent the places of that are shown on all of the marketing campaign products. The three products clearly ‘speak’ to and appeal to the same target audience, this is because our primary target audience would be young adults/teenagers in which it is clear that the characters shown in the three products are all of that age in which makes our target audience more able to connect with the characters in the narrative. How it represents its genre?Our hybrid genre of the film was psychological thriller in which when we looked at the ‘Black Swan’ of the similar genre we noticed the darkness that was used throughout the trailer, poster and magazine covers in which we used the same look and ensured we kept with the same kind of dark low key lighting. Likewise to our trailer we included the dark and tense look to build the suspense of what the film could be about.