Media Evaluation Question 2 : How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

As Sick’end Pictures we have put together three types of media for the promotion of our horror movie ‘Keys’, a teaser trailer, a magazine cover, and a movie poster. The main aim and target was to integrate our three products to work with each other well and generate a story to the audience, in order to create professional pieces of production that resemble the real media in society today. Throughout pre-production, we had a theme in our minds, and preconceptions of how exactly we wanted our media to look in the end. After planning and discussing colour schemes, we decided we wanted black to be quite a predominate colour, as cliché as it sounds we just wanted our products to be quite dark and gloom and spooky, which is connoted to represent mystery and evil. After focusing on the colour scheme, we drew up our logo which would play a big role in trying to create continuity and recognition by the audience. We incorporated this into all parts of our media.
First and foremost is the movie teaser trailer, which is a very brief taster of Keys. Again we adapted the dark colour scheme in this media product, and the font used is consistent throughout the trailer,




We used a lot of pale colors to create an eerie effect. The point of all this synchronization was to create a sense of identification. For example if these products were for the promotion of a real film, we would hope that audiences would see the poster and would automatically get the connection between it and the teaser trailer that they may have seen the previous day.











And at the end of the teaser trailer our Keys logo is present, for familiarity and recognition and especially branding. The same font and coloring was then adapted into our film poster and magazine cover so our audience can distinguish between Sick’end pictures material.




When we were ready for our classmates and other people to view our media products, we debated ways in which we could create a buzz and big interest around our products. Undeniably if you constantly see something in magazines, on TV, on billboards, on the Internet or even on the news, you would talk about it! So we ended up posting our teaser 3 products on Facebook & our teaser trailer YouTube and got a lot of comments to add to our audience research.
It is very important to use a lot of advertisement and networking to create success around your production. Some big time film Company’s especially Warner Bros take full advantage of how technology can make a films success take rapid growth and become well known universally. A prime example of one of their films that was a massive achievement was “Dark Knight” directed by Christopher Nolan, distributed by Warner Bros. Its production budget was £ 113 million; bringing in a whooping total gross of £ 324’084’106 million in the box office. The film did so well and made incredible profit because of its intensity of promotion to all types of audiences, through lots of different ways, posters viral ads, games online, ads on food products, multiple trailers, competitions, toys and collectables, phone applications etc.






Obviously as students we cannot produce promotion in such intensity, but we tried our best to make our products available in variable ways. The poster and magazine cover are accessible on different websites online, e.g. Facebook accounts, Twitter, and Piczo. They were also put up in college for feedback and copies were sent around on mobiles via blackberry messenger as we had transferred the files onto our mobiles, so people could share any comments. We feel that our media products have been advertised to a good extent and are available for people to look at and comment on easily. Also on our Facebook accounts we have links to our blog & the Keys teaser trailer YouTube link as well.
To promote our teaser trailer we also did a pre-screening for some media students and recorded their reactions and their feedback. I think this was good because it also added to the buzz we were trying to create as it got people talking, plus it added to our audience research.
In all three products we have pictures of the same Keys, our main prop, which plays an incredible significance to our movie, again so our audience can understand that these three products being together and are all promoting the same main product – Keys the movie.


The idea of using continuity is a clever one because it lets everything flow, and will give us a household name, also creating a sense of stability. If we didn’t used continuity i.e. the same colors, fonts, logo across our products it would make our work look weak and there would be no connection, so how can Sick’end pictures create a fan base, they wouldn’t know what they would be following because every time we created some new media it would be significantly different from the last, not saying that all pieces of media should look the same, just have something in common so their can be a link between it all, and our work can be identified easily out of many.