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

In order for a film to become successful a lot rests on proper marketing of said film as it is not just a film anymore it is a media package. It is not just the trailer that makes someone want to watch a film; it’s the posters and reviews as well. If a poster is not effective then it won’t grab the audience’s attention so I tried hard to relate my poster to my film, as well as my review to my film. Film reviews also play a key part in the marketing of films; if a film gets a bad review then it will become less likely to become as successful as one with a good review.

In order for films to spark the audience’s interest early on teaser posters are released, this is what I did with my short film poster. My poster feature a photo Barbie following her drug overdose, it featured very few details only the name of the film, the tagline, release date. Although in lower case, smaller to the eye, are the name of my production companies and the names of those starring in my short. The combination of both my short film and poster works well together in my opinion, both represent Barbie in a different light one that no one expects. In order to create an effective poster I researched heavily into different types of posters and deconstructed them. I mainly concentrated on minimalist posters, as that is the type I wanted to produce for my own. One of the posters I looked at was the Star Wars teaser poster, now this was a rather simplistic poster but it told a lot about the story without doing much, the shadow that Anakin casts on the house in the background is that of his future self. This was very effective and I wanted to portray something like this in my film poster. But instead I went down a different path, one that would better represent my film as a whole. By incorporating an image of Barbie, a close up image of her face, it shows her vacant stare. I felt this was important for my poster to show this as even though it is impossible to change it is key for my short as it represents the whole storyline. In hindsight I think a different image may have been more effective instead of the one I have chosen as this image may have given too much away in the plot or confused the audience.

As important as a poster is to the proper marketing of a film a review is as important or even more so as a review can make or break a film. There are many different mediums in which reviews of films can be made, even a tweet or status update can be classed a film review in this day and age. If a film were to receive a bad review then the likelihood of it becoming successful takes a massive dip. When creating my film review I believed it to be important to style my writing around that of other reviews to make it more realistic. After lots of research into different film magazines I styled my writing style on different journalists and how they review a film. I felt it was important to have a common theme running through both of my ancillary tasks and my film, the constant Barbie pink colour scheme I felt to be important as it kept bringing the audience back to the main aspect of my short. I feel that my poster and film review work well together and are in keeping with the genre and design of my film and complement each other in numerous different ways. 

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

There are many conventions of short films which I both used and developed upon. One convention of short films is that they have very few characters, as it would be impossible to adequately introduce lots of different characters into a film which is so short; this is something I implemented in my short. I have very few characters in my film; only the title character, Barbie, and Ken have a back story as it would be impossible to go into detail about every character’s life history, as that would turn a short into a longer film breaking another convention. The length of a short film is probably one of the most important conventions as in order for a film to be classed as a short it needs to be between 3-30 minutes long. My film does conform to this convention as it is only just under 4 minutes long.

Another convention of a short film is that this is a twist in the story; my whole film is full of storyline twists. In order to keep the audience laughing my storyline keeps them guessing adding shock value. It is not the typical Barbie and Ken story, the whole thing is a twist – the atypical Barbie story flipped on its head. The story is the opposite of what you’d expect, just what a successful short film aims to do.

I wanted to emulate a comedy style mockumentary, in order to understand the conventions of this genre I researched it thoroughly. By looking at other films in the mockumentary genre, one in particular being from the creators of “Funny or Die” videos. Many of these videos are mockumentaries or comedy shorts, taking ordinary situations and flipping them on their hear making them unexpected and amusing just like how I wanted my film to come across. One short film in particular I looked at was “Home For Actresses” this is a short documenting a home where actresses go to learn their craft, it is a documentary style short but it is comedic.

As my short is a stop motion film I challenged one of the conventions of this genre by incorporating an element of live action within the stop motion. Most of my film is stop motion however, I made it a film within a film adding the conversation with the Real Life Barbie, this does not conform to other stop motion or mockumentary short films.