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

Trailer Our trailer promotes our film as it creates lots of enigmas that are left unanswered. This makes people want to go and see the film to find out what happens. Our slogan of "What would happen if the currency was abolished?" asks the viewer to put themselves in the main characters shoes and think about their own reaction, instantly relating the viewer to the character. The revolutionary idea within our trailer will appeal to our young adult target audience much like the rioting footage in French film La Haine did. Many young British people our getting involved in politics in opposition to the government due to false promises regarding education.

The main character is a teenager which appeals to a young adult audience as it is easier for them to relate with him through his journey The well crafted dystopia mise en scene and stylistic approach to our trailer makes it aesthetically pleasing, encouraging people to go and see the feature film. As our film is a 15 like the majority of dystopian films, we weren’t very limited in terms of restrictions for violence/language/sex. However, we wanted our trailer to be available to everyone to interest younger viewers as films are mainly watched by people from the age of 12-25 years old.

Film Poster The main image on our poster is of the main character. This is common with dystopia films such as The Terminator, Starship Troopers and Elysium. The main image of our main character has a feather effect to create an intriguing faded effect to represent his disappearance from society. A revolutionary theme is introduced through our tagline of “We are the beginning of our end”. This challenging theme of anti authority is one that we tried to force through to appeal to the youth of our today with protests becoming a common way to vent anger. The contrasting Houses of Parliament in the sun and in the supernatural storm hint at the upcoming uprising. It creates a dystopic atmosphere so our target audience can instantly identify with it.

From my research, I discovered that good posters have very little text and use imagery to convey meaning. We followed this convention in the construction of our film poster to ensure it was as aesthetically pleasing as possible yet still gave a sufficient amount of information. The only text we have on our poster is our main actors name to attract an audience, our tagline, the title of our film and the billing block at the bottom. This lack of text led us to be more experimental with images and their connotations. For the top image, the text is a bold black to represent the formality and strength of the government over the authority. In the image below, the text is white and begins to fade away to resemble the downfall of the authoritarian government as the revolutionists reveal the corrupt conspiracies. The text also contrasts from each background colour (dark on bright/bright on dark) which makes the title easily readable for people that view the poster, key to the film title being memorable. This film poster will appear on bus stops, magazine advertisements and in cinemas. We would also feature it in places where young people gather such as the promotion blocks for clubs and pubs, appealing to our target audience.

Film Magazine Cover The film magazine is intended to attract a more specialist audience as Empire is a magazine dedicated to film. By creating an appealing front cover, the reader will hopefully become intrigued and read more about our film inside the magazine. It promotes our film as it is clearly the main focus of the cover, making it appear important. Other blockbusters such as the Wolf of Wall Street are offered are briefly mentioned but Conspiracy is the feature film of the edition, emphasising its significance. We wanted to ensure our cover produced lots of enigmas and leave the reader wanting to find out more about the film. We did this through our dark urban background which appears ominous and thrilling. The colour graded blues and blacks help create a dystopic atmosphere, an aspect we were particularly proud of in our trailer.

We decided to stick with the conventional red Empire title in comparison to less distinctive Empire magazine covers such as the white Captain America one. This attracts the audiences attention to the Empire title, the best selling UK film publication, making a potential reader more likely to purchase it. The white outline on our text means it stands out against the dark background so our film title is easily readable to anyone glancing at it. The Empire film magazine readership is a more specialist audience that have a particular interest in cinema. This means our film is being promoted to a broader audience than our age specific young target audience. I feel like our unique narrative and challenging themes will appeal to an audience interested in cinema as no film like this has ever been made. Although Empire isn’t as digitally successful as Total Film, we could offer online exclusive information and clips as our young target audience are an active, digital generation.

Film Promotion These two ancillary products come together nicely to appeal to a broad audience and a more specialist audience. We would use the internet effectively to appeal to our young target audience as 15-25 year olds are the most common users of web 2.0. As well as specific campaigns on the four most common social networking websites for young people (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat), we would use websites like Spotify, IGN and Netflix to appeal to our young, entertainment enthralled target audience. We would use viral marketing on these social networking sites by creating conspiracies and spreading them about the film. Especially on Twitter, word of mouth spreads incredibly quickly and this would be easily achievable. La Haine gathered mass attention when the police turned their backs to the cast and crew at Cannes Film Festival. Something controversial like this could happen due to our anti authoritarian themes and would spark a huge buzz around our film, gaining us lots of attention.