Evaluation Question 2

The question in this evaluation question is 'How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?'

This question is essentially asking how well my group's Media products, poster, magazine and teaser trailer worked together.

The first part of this question can deal with the cross media promotion side of our products.
Advertising can come in many different shapes and forms. One form of advertising is through the use of advertising in newspapers. Our film is based in London, meaning that we'd mainly aim our movie at Londoners. Newspapers would help with this as 10 London-based national titles sell an average of 9,540,993 a day - meaning that newspapers are still a very good way to get any advert you want out into the open, in the hope it'll attract a wide audience. Information from http://bit.ly/fpvXVV . Whilst it's not as popular as the internet, since the invention of the internet and 'web 2.0' it's still a popular way for people to get the news. Below is an image of how we would advertise our movie in a newspaper, with this particular newspaper being 'The Sun'.

To continue with the cross media promotion of our poster, I (Harry) decided to test out how the poster would look on other ways of advertising.

At train stations:

This image was done, as a valuable way for people to get round town would be from the use of trains. So with this being said, if you could successfully advertise your poster on a little billboard at a train station it would gain massive exposure and lead a hype surrounding it’s release. Below is the image of how it would look being advertised at a train station.

 At the bus stop:

Another valuable way for people to travel these days is on buses. So, with this being said, as buses are notorious for taking long to come it means that people are waiting around at bus stops. So with the fact that there is advertising boards at bus stops, were you able to put up your poster it would gain attention from people waiting for their bus –were they to wait long for the bus they would most certainly catch a glimpse of the poster, at least once and hopefully catch their attention and make them want to go see the movie thus making it a successful advertising campaign.

On buses:

But why stop at just advertising on bus stops? Why not advertising on the ACTUAL bus? This way everyone walking around town would see it, from buses journeying and gain it an even wider audience.

The poster was the first product to be made and thus would set the tone for how the other products would eventually look and set about the trends for the rest of the products to follow. Firstly, the font we used for the title of the movie ‘A Beautiful Nightmare’ was called ‘face your fears’ and is available for a free download of dafont.com. We felt this font was effective due to it connotation an ‘cut’ or ‘slash’ look effect to it– this would help us also promote the fact that our genre, for our movie, is of ‘slasher horror’.

We also got our font for the credits of our movie of dafont.com. This font was a very simple movie font that we used to look more professional, as if they were real credits.

The poster set the tone for our colour scheme, due to its low-key lighting and the fact that the title was written in ‘red’ font. The same style font for the title would also be used throughout our products, as seen below.

Having the main character on all our ancillary products also helped it work well and give us an almost brand. The character is played by Adeola and she is involved in each text, see image. This also gave us continuity.

As time goes by we see the introduction of new and better technology ready for us, the public, to use and enjoy. This can also be seen in our advertising. As technology’s advanced it has allowed such gadgets as mobile phones to not only call people these days, but to also become an ‘mini-computer’. This has meant that people are now about to browse through the Internet, just from one click on their phone and also allowed people to be able to converse and share date, news with each other.  This meant it would be very wise if we could also get our movie on to these new mobile phones. Arguably the biggest company’s in the phone business are Apple and Blackberry, through the release of their phones ‘i-Phone’ and ‘Blackberry’ respectively. So another way to get our film ‘out there’ would be for downloadable products to be made available, for these two phones. So on the i-Phone we can make an app, ready for peoples downloads so they can enjoy our movie in a totally different platform.

If you have a Blackberry, why not scan the image below. By scanning this image it will link your Blackberry to a ‘Slasher Inc’ page on BBM where you can be kept up to date with all the latest news about our movies release, give you the latest images associated with the movie and just lets you converse with us, the movies makers.

Elizabeth's response

Recently, over the years cross media convergence has been playing a significant part in how media gets to and is consumed by us. From the standard print media to the wide spread use of social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, ‘Smartphones’ such as Blackberry and iPhone it has never been this easy to access information at such a fast rate.

When a producer wants to market a movie, social networking sites are one of the platforms targeted and these are all forms of viral marketing. The 2008 film directed, produced and co-written by Christopher Nolan ‘The Dark Knight’ was a very successful film as it was really good in terms of how and where the film was marketed. Cross media convergence and synergy was used effectively in promoting this film by creating a buzz between fans. In May 2007, a viral marketing campaign employed the ‘Why so serious?’ tagline on a wide scale with various websites constructed to interest fans. A year later in May 2008, a number of American theme parks opened The Dark Knight rollercoaster which simulates being stalked by the Joker. These rollercoaster’s cost a whopping $7.5 million to build up. The intelligent strategies used in the unique campaign made it a different experience and it definitely impressed the reported 10million participants!

Even in Britain too, limited editions of The Dark Knight themed game consoles were released (one of the ways synergy was used with the illustrious company Sony). Various competitions were giving out this device as a prize, thus promoting the film even more.

Print screen of the limited edition Dark Knight game console  

A vast number of mobile phone themes were designed and many were even available for free download, which is of course is enticing to people. 

Also on MySpace there was a Dark Knight take over and many backgrounds to choose from to customize your MySpace page.

Examples of The Dark Knight themed MySpace backgrounds

Another effective thing The Dark Knight used was having a number of various posters. By using this element it made it unique and much more enticing to the audience, making them curious as to what to expect next. Each of the posters has the batman logo on it which makes them recognisable to the audience.

Examples of some of The Dark Knight movie posters

After analysing the marketing and promotional techniques that was used for The Dark Knight, I know how important it is to promote and create a buzz about your film on a number of platforms. Evidently, it is very important for a film to invest in promotional means as this can have a massive impact on how successful the film is. As well as putting up our poster on billboards and buses, we decided that apps would be useful too as phones are mainly what people access the internet on these days (especially young people). By creating games, and other interactive apps like this it could get our film more recognition.

The 'A Beautiful Nightmare' app on a Blackberry Torch

The 'A Beautiful Nightmare' app on an iPhone 4s

Adeola's Response

When we began the coursework we had the idea that all of our final pieces should have a corresponding link to one another. We thought it would make the magazine and poster more successful in correspondence to the trailer as it would not make sense if all three products had different themes, images, costumes and props.  This would have led to a lack of continuity.

As part of our pre-production we decided as a group to keep a flow of continuity throughout or products. As you can see the magazine, poster and teaser trailer all use the same fonts.

For the poster, magazine and teaser trailer we decided to use the colour red which connotes blood, evil and mystery. We thought this would be effective for our product and ancillary text based on the fact that we was producing a teaser trailer.  As a background to our products we used the colour black, we believed this would be effective due to the fact that black connotes darkness and fear and that was our aim for our three final products.  The rule of continuity was used throughout other movies such as The Dark Knight which was Directed by Christopher Nolan who worked alongside Writer Jonathan Nolan.

For our ancillary texts the photographs were taken against a blue background. We had to adjust the lighting to ensure that we achieved the black background we had set out for. This was quite demanding at 1^st but once we understood the concept of how the lighting works it became simple to tackle.  We had to ensure that we had a black background because our teaser trailer was going to end with a black background as the text ‘Beautiful Nightmare’ appears.  To ensure that our three final products worked together effectively we made sure that the victim was wearing the same costume throughout (As seen in the image below).  This made it easier for the audience to link the final product and ancillary texts together.  As seen in the Dark Knight promotion the batman theme was kept consistent through all of their real media products.  

The variation of Platforms that were used for the Dark Knight’s promotion created a buzz amongst the audience. During our pre-production planning we had came up with a number of ways in which we thought would be effective.

Similarly to the promotion of the Dark Knight which was distributed by Working Title, we thought it would help the release of our film if he had an app for mobile phones. In this case it would be on the IPAD.

The Dark Knight  was a highly successful film and this was mainly due to the different forms of promotion that they used. This is known as cross media convergence, where different media formats work together.  In our everyday lives we come across buses, billboard and posters at bus stops. I believe this is an effective form of promotion because the public would be constantly reminded of the  media product. As a group we also thought that it would be a good idea to have a production name so that the potential audiences can make that link from Slasher Inc. to Beautiful Nightmare. 

 

 

Since the Blackberry Android Smartphone came out they have become an increasingly popular device. An android Smartphone is one where you can browse the internet, talk to friends via BBM, listen to the radio and more.  The Blackberry Smartphone would be an ideal platform to promote our film based on the fact that our film is aimed at people aged 18+ and that is the same age group as those who use The Blackberry.  We have created a few images as to what our media product would look like on The Blackberry Smartphone.