Evaluation: How effective is the combination of your Film, Poster and Magazine?

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

All the work we've completed has looked at the conventions within the media industry. The posters and magazines in particular were solely focused on the standard conventions of horror film posters and magazines and how they were created, represented and portrayed to the audience.

For our poster, we looked at many well-known movies to create our poster on. We looked at the different magazines for Texas Chainsaw Massacre to show how they have changed over time. We compared the 1974 film poster to the modern day posters for the film franchise. This helped us to judge what the modern features and conventions of magazines are and what we should include to make sure it looks sleek and up-to-date with modern times. We also studied Friday the 13^th’s poster so we could compare another large film franchise and their styles of posters. By comparing the two sets of posters, we saw the common themes. For example, dark colours as background, lots of red as the blood, not too much text (but any text to be white or red) and a large main central image to grab the attention of the audience.

Right at the beginning of our work, we instantly looked at two movie posters to create initial ideas of how ours would look. We analysed ‘The Thing’ and ‘The Amityville Horror’ film posters, which were slightly different from common conventions. They both used the same text colours of either red or white, whilst not having too much text. However, ‘The Thing’ used the masthead to show the main central image in the font. This was interesting, but it wasn’t very typical of the industry and so we didn’t use many of its features. ‘The Amityville Horror’ poster also went against the common themes by using some different colours. The lighting on the building in the background makes it stand out, but the green tint isn’t common for horror posters. On top of this, the masthead was quite a thin font, which was different to the other posters we have looked at because it doesn’t stand out as much and so doesn’t attract the audience as much as a larger font. We used these posters to create our own poster right at the start, where we tried to use the common conventions from these posters.

By the time we were creating our final posters, our idea of the conventions had been fine-tuned and so our posters could be more conventional to the industry. A conventional poster is beneficial to smaller media companies as it helps the audience associate the poster with the industry. A bizarre, unconventional poster may be more difficult for the audience to know the genre just from looking at the poster, and so may not help the film get viewed.

For our magazines, we studied ‘SCREAM’ in great detail, as we wanted to look at a magazine that works with our genre. Scream class themselves as the number 1 horror magazine and so we wanted to use the conventions they had to create our own horror magazine. ‘SCREAM’ used a large main central image with puffs neatly down one side with a standout border. We wanted to create similar effects for our own magazine front cover, and so we created a sleek front cover with text down the right hand side, neatly boarded off from the main central image. We had the title along the top with the pricing and the website, and the barcode in the bottom corner.

We also looked at some other magazine front covers such as Empire and Match Of The Day. We used our analysis of Match Of The Day to look at how they displayed puffs to advertise the rest of the magazine. They placed puffs randomly around the front cover in different shapes to fill the empty spaces. They made sure the front cover was full of colour and was very eye-catching. However this didn’t particularly help with our magazine front cover due to the largely different target audiences (kids vs adults) and genres (sport vs horror). Empire magazine was more relevant to use. They used a large central image that spans the whole page and goes behind the text, with headings down the side to display the content of the magazine. We used the ideas of Empire to help with the layout of our magazine to make sure it looks sleek and professional.

For our film, we looked at a few short films, some stop-start animations, YouTube videos, film segments and many film trailers. Each of these helped our production in different ways, so we could collect the common conventions and then create our work with these conventions in mind.

The trailers were useful as it focuses on the editing in great detail, helping us because a short film needs to be like a long trailer so it can keep the audiences attention. We also looked at a few YouTube videos to look at editing techniques so we could utilise FinalCutPro better. By looking at the editing in detail, we were able to improve our work and make it far more professional.

We looked at stop-start animations so we could get some ideas as to how we would incorporate elements into our film smoothly. Once we decided on the conventions of the stop-start animations, we studied the key ideas as to how to film it. Then we were able to begin our plan of what to film, where to have the camera and golliwog, and how to keep the golliwog in position whilst filming.

We used segments from other films such as 'Kingsman' to focus on music. We needed to ensure we had correct music to the scene, but also considered the use of contrapuntal music in our production. We know that music plays a big role in a film to engage the audience and create a specific mind-set for the audience. The soundtracks need to be engaging to make the film more gripping for the audience. The conventions of music were that the edits were timed with the beats, and the music is load but fades at the end.

Overall, our film, poster and magazines interlink nicely to create a strong, initial brand image for ‘Oblivion Productions’ because we used the same colour schemes and similar styles throughout all our work. On top of that, our work should appeal to lots of favourites of horror films as our work looks professional and so appeal strongly to the audience. The posters and magazines hopefully will attract the audiences to watch our film and boost the overall views of our production.