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

So that we could market and promote our production we created a combination of posters and a film review. This is normal procedure for any film production process when placing your film onto the market. You may say that the posters would act as the first inital stimuli , which the public would see around their local areas or on the side of bus's. The aim of the posters are to create a hype and awareness for our short film. The film review would follow this and would target people who may need a little more persuasion, that's why we would have ratings and brief explanation of what the film is about.
When creating the first of three posters , we decided we wanted the posters to link very closely with our short film. This is why our genre is reflected in each, which should mean our target audience will know what the genre is , making them want to see the film more. The idea for the first poster came after conducting research into other film posters of the same genre. While I was looking I came along the poster for the City of God. Although the film does not share the same genre , the layout of the images (scattered around a black canvas) appealed to me. This was because it didn't follow the normal conventions for a film poster. We have taken the same approach for ours. As the short film itself doesn't really follow the normal conventions of a short film , I thought it would be fitting to try and covey this onto our poster. The images I chose to place onto the poster came were screenshots from the actual production itself. The first is of one of the characters during the cowboy scene. The lighting of the image is low key , complementing the black background. The image creates a serious feeling about poster , which may seem strange as it is a comedy. But it's for that exact reason why I used the images ; the images them selves are funny. And so if you mix something funny with a serious element you enhance the comedy aspect. For example , when you are told to be quite in a class your automatic reaction is to speak , as it will be funny if you do. Yasmin (who is the person in the image) has a angry but silly face gesture. This reflects the film itself which is comedy , and has many serious scenes but with a comical twist. The image below is a two shot of Becca and Yasmin who play the two characters posing as if they were gangstars. The description alone is funny enough but seeing the image itself is even better. It is placed there because its a part in the film which was created to make people laugh. Although we may be giving part of the film away , it an image which the public will remember , and if they laughed when seeing the image, they are going to laugh when they see it within the film. The girls are both wearing hoods which the audience can also use to recognize the characters. The link between the film is important , from past experience I know that the smallest detail can be the decider for a member of the public on whether they choose to see your film or not. With the other two posters , we decided on making them individuals for each character. The reason behind this was due to the fact that the production has been created around the two , and so we wanted to reflect this within our posters.Again screen shots were used so that the audience could have a glimpse of how our film presented itself , quality wise. Each image used came from the scenes in which the two girls had tracking shots taken of them walking down a street. Each has the same key lighting and the size of the posters are the same. This is so that the public know that the posters are linked , which at the same time introduces them to the characters. The characters share a really serious look into the camera, but their costumes make them look really silly. This is parallel to our film , which twist serious moments into comical genius. The whole point of the posters for the characters is to just slowly introduce them to the public. The members of the public who are drawn to to the poster will hopefully be our target audience as we are targeting younger people who will have a less mature sense of humour.
The film review would be the next step when marketing our film. Film reviews are written by people who analyse your film to it deepest depths. There words can be the difference between someone watching your film or not. For independent films , it is harder to gain good reviews from the top critics , as they only write for the mainstream film magazines. I thought that by placing our review inside the empire magazine it would be a great opportunity , as it would mean millions of people would read the review , instead of it being limited to only independent film lovers. Our layout was created to appeal to teenagers/ young men. This is reflected through our colour scheme of light blue and green. The bright colours are what will catch the attention of the readers , especially with the younger reader. Obviously the review was always going to be positive , if not then your just setting yourself up for a fail before you have even started. Within the review I have used words such a 'hilarious' and 'comical masterpiece' which are tags linked with our genre. These links are important because they will be associated to our film , and they will be used by the reader as well to describe our film to others.
Overall we believe that our production and ancillary text's compliment each other really well. Our genre is the stem which grows through both, highlighting that film is both comical and family friendly. We know that we have created a positive image and that not too much has been given away , creating that hype and promoting our film.