Evaluation question 2 script

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

(To have our main task along side our two ancillary tasks displayed at the start) 

(You should mention: research, narrative, use of colour, text, font, images, sound, mode of address and how they link across your brand)

For our ancillary tasks, we had to create both a poster for the film we were making the trailer for as well as the cover of a magazine which would be promoting our film. 

For the poster, we decided to reference the house in the poster, as the house is technically the antagonist of the film. From my research; posters tend to show off a film's antagonist over the protagonist, hence this seemed an apt choice. Furthermore; the shot of the house is taken in the same place as one of the final shots of trailer, thus allowing the audience to make an instant link between the trailer and the poster. As with the rest of the poster including the titles and credits, these are designed to mimic the style of an actual film poster. 

The magazine cover features our protagonist rather than our principal antagonist. Given the fact that film magazines always feature a person, or humanoid like creature on the cover, we wouldn't have been able to put the house on the cover as it would break conventions. Instead; we used a picture of the film's protagonist; Joseph. The magazine itself has been inspired by many different issues of Empire, simply because I wanted the magazine I was designing the cover for to be Empire. Once again; we followed all the necessary conventions of magazine covers to ensure our magazine cover looked as real as possible.

The use of colour is key when designing anything to do with horror. A number of dark colours have to be utilised, such as blacks and greys. This however does need to be contrasted, otherwise the colouring will quickly become repetitive and boring. Red is the colour normally used to contrast black and grey in this situation, as red carries a number of connotations with it, such as blood and danger. Similarly, white can also be a strong contrast as the two colours are binary opposites.

The trailer being for 'Behind the Scarlet Door', colour is something we needed made constant use of. We carried across the use of red into both our ancillary tasks. The poster features blood smears, which obviously indicate danger and suffering. Red is also the primary colour for the font used across the magazine cover. This is further helped by the fact the normal Empire title is red as well. This means that the red on the magazine suggests a house style for the magazine even though it is a single page. 

The dark silhouette in the window of the house is a contrast to the bright orange light behind it, yet the silhouette is faded out just enough to allow the audience to question if the person being hung is actually there. The poster also has a dark filter over the top, which gives the poster a dark and grainy effect; perhaps suggesting age to the poster and making reference to the length of time that the house has been ruled over by evil spirits.

The smokey texture behind the protagonist on the magazine cover also contrasts well to the black and red of the magazine, as does the doll the protagonist is holding due to the incredibly pale face and plain clothes it possessed. This is also a link to our trailer, as the doll features heavily in one scene in the attic.
For our other poster, the colour red features even more heavily. There is a distinct lack of contrast to this picture, with the colour red dominating the entire image. The shadowy figure seen on the center of the image as well as the clock image which has been overlapped over the main image and has had the opacity changed are really the only points of contrast. The white clock face is visible due to the contrast in colour, and the darkness of the shadowy figure is also a point of great contrast. Aside from this, the emphasis really is on the red colour featured in the image.

The fonts for the title of the film is the same font featured in all three tasks; Trajan pro. The other fonts used on the magazine cover include the generic 'Empire magazine' font, and other similar fonts used on other covers such as Perpetua Titling MT and Plantagenet Chero. The fonts used across the posters also include the same fonts as well as the main font Trajan Pro. These fonts not only allow us to create a house style for our content, but also keep the three tasks linked at a single glance. The only font that truly differed to this is the font used at the bottom of the film posters. Steel Tongs is the font used for this, which is indeed designed to mirror the fonts used on film posters normally, so much so that it had to be downloaded online and wasn't preloaded onto photoshop.

Images play a key role in any poster or any magazine cover as they are what catch the eye of any potential customers. Rather than make use of the constant macabre images that were seen throughout our trailer we actually made use of other more simplistic images, albeit with a more macabre hint after editing. The main image for our first poster is that of our main location; the house. The image itself has been massively edited to carry a dark mysterious hue to it. The effect is actually very similar to parchment paper, making it appear as if the poster has been aged. The image of the man hanging in the window shows that the film is a horror film, which can be questioned otherwise. Aside from this, the blood on the bottom of the poster is a good indicator to this.  In the other poster, the image of the clock, the door and the man in the window all go together to create a strong feeling of horror, which stands out even more due to the red colour which makes up the image. Finally, the magazine cover makes use of the image of the protagonist holding a doll, as well as the image of smoke. The smoke behind the protagonist is a strong image as is the doll being held by him. Both are actually images featured in the attic scene of our trailer, creating a link between the main and ancillary tasks.

The sound utilised in the trailer hardly carries across into our ancilary tasks, yet we made sure our sound effects stuck to the conventions of actual horror film trailers. Aside from this, sound doesn't really play a part in our ancillary tasks, as both make use of the medium of print, preventing us from adding any sound.

The mode of address used across all three differs slightly. The magazine makes use of the same mode of address as the other Empire magazines on the market. The tagline "is this 2014's scariest film" is actually taken from an older edition of the magazine, which asked the same question, but of the year 2013. The other main features of the magazine are indeed inspired by other older editions of the magazine, including the "year of fear" section. Similarly, the tagline used in one of the posters is a fairly generic line, yet fits the tone of the film well; "welcome home." This gives the impression that something is waiting for the main character to return to the house, allowing the audience to come up with their own preconceptions of the film before they have even seen the trailer. The mode of address on the posters is fairly basic as it is designed to mirror the style of that seen on actual film posters. This information is standard of almost all film posters, and so was easy to replicate for our posters. Whilst it isn't really mode of address, we also made sure to add the necessary company logos and icons which denote that this is our film.