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.