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

By Sian Melia and Sammy Buck

• To get something noticed in this day and age you have to stand out from the crowd. Media products have extremely fierce competition as they this is such a huge part of everyday life, that if your product doesn’t get noticed it will never sell.

• To allow my media products any chance in this tough modern market that is the

real world, I wanted to get as much research as I could. I firstly started off just researching what my products are. So reading what makes teaser trailers so special, certain features and stuff like that. Just so I could start to grab ideas in my mind. The same with the magazine front covers and posters. When I actually came to doing market research and studying similar products in the chosen genre, I noticed a similarity between them. Not necessarily between the different products, but similarities in the same field. Posters seemed to show significant similarities and the same with magazine front covers.

Magazine covers and posters we both based our ancillary tasks on.

Sians completed poster

Sammys completed poster

Sian and Sammy’s completed magazine covers.

• When doing my research, there were noticeable trends with in a film teaser for my chosen genre, which both of us have tried to replicate and add to our teaser trailer to make it realistic and professional. The poster and magazine advert then obviously have to go with this film trailer. While filming the film, we both had some forward thinking and we took some photos while out on location just in case we needed any later on. This was beneficial because we both had a large range of photos to choose from. By doing this, we are both able to keep the theme of location in the teaser trailer and the poster. This is one of the keys aspects that will help the audience notice that these two media products link together.

Editing stages of both of our posters

Editing stages of both of our magazine covers

Photos from filming and screenshots from editing

• With the magazine front cover, it seems for different genres they have different covers, for action is usually has stunning visual effects from the film on the front cover, where as for drama I noticed it usually seems to be a centre shot of either a solo actor, or two main actors. When coming to make my magazine front cover both of wanted to keep in trend with this and both used a different shot’s of Sammy and his little sister (the two main actors) as the centre shot. I purposely placed behind the original shot, the give her a ghostly appearance, as this was one of the key features in the film, and I then placed this on a white background. Keeping in trend with the forest style theme of the whole film, I used a very faint image of Sammy forest backdrop (which was in the graveyard) which I took myself also while on location filming. This was also a very valuable thing to do because yet again I’ve kept the magazine front cover in sync with the film poster and film teaser trailer.

• Both of us are really pleased with how our 3 media products turned out because when placed together you can see a very strong correlation between them, and instantly noticeable that these are meant to be part of a set. They all carry the theme of location, i.e. a forest/country park within them and this is clearly noticeable when you take a look at them. Along with this the use of titles and colour in both, allow the audience to clearly distinguish the genre of the film. We both feel that if they didn’t have this then it wouldn’t be as effective because location is a vital part of our trailer. Without the locations our films would be very different and probably not as good as it would be.