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

2. Why it’s important to market a film If you don’t market a film it’s very unlikely to be a popular film. To market a film you need to make sure you are posotive of your target audience. Making sure you don’t narrow down your target audience too much may be difficult as the wider the audience the bigger the profit. However, you need to make sure you know exactly who you are making the film for. An easy way of doing this is to make a target profile. For example: ‘A target profile for Fatal Intentions would be Ben. Ben is a 19 year old white male who lives in the centre of Brighton. Ben likes to meet drive around in his Vauxhall Corsa with his music on full volume. Ben usually watches channels such as Dave and MTV. His favourite films at the moment are Harry Brown and Kidulthood.’ This would be an example of a target profile for our film.

3. Film marketing cont. Once you have your target audience, it then makes it easier to know where to market and promote your film. Distributors will want to market their films around places their target audience will see but also want to market it where a range of people will see. The internet is one of the biggest, easiest and cheapest ways to advertise especially for audiences of around 15-30 (which is what our film is targeted for) as this demographic have been brought up around web 2.0, social media and just internet based devices in general. It is also now much easier to access the internet as it is available on more and more portable platforms such as mobile phones, tablets and laptops. This can also be a disadvantage to distributors as it means they may have to limit their promotion such as trailers and posters so that it is suitable for ALL viewers as everyone can access the internet. This could mean that the full potential of the film is not shown which for independent companies could lose them a lot of viewers. Although when films are promoted online, with the use of Web 2.0, things can be viewed, shared, commented on and ‘liked’ creating positive or negative word of mouth (WOM). WOM is important as one is much more likely to watch a film if a friend has recommended it as you (hopefully) trust your friends/family.

4. Marketing our own film We chose to use the independent distributor ‘Pathe’ as our film is a British Crime/Gangster film. Pathe had also distributed the film Adulthood (2008) and other crime films that were like our film. Our main target audience is men and women of ages 15-30. Because of this we felt that the internet would play a big part in our campaign as it is cheap as well as reliable. If we were a mainstream company we would have had much bigger plans with our film marketing but as we’re independent we had to think about our budget.

5. Marketing Film festivals and the press are a very big part of film promotion. If you get bad reviews from the press this will decrease the amount of people who want to go and see your film, therefore leaving a negative response from people. However, if your film wins an award or is even nominated for awards such as Sundance, BFI London or Cannes Film Festival this will create a positive reaction from the public and will attract more viewers. For example, Pulp Fiction won best picture at the Cannes Film Festival which then created positive and exciting responses all round the world.

6. PROMOTIONAL TOOLS - TRAILERS Trailers will usually always be the most reliable way to judge a film. It is essentially the best bits of the film out into a 2 minute clip. This 2 minute clip reveals the main characters, the genre and hints at the narrative. The trailer usually shows parts of the equilibrium and the disruption but not the new equilibrium. If the new equilibrium is shown it is usually shown at the beginning making the trailer non-linear so that it confuses the audience in order to not give too much away. We didn’t want to reveal too much of our film in our trailer so we did not reveal any of our new equilibrium and also kept the enigmatic code of ‘The Boss’s character. We felt this would intrigue our audience more to watch the film. Most of our film trailer was parts of the disruption and was edited in a non linear way to confuse the audience to encourage them to watch the film.

7. Release date We have decided to release our film on Friday April 10 th as there are no crime films being released on this date. We thought that as it will be coming up the weekend and also in the Easter holidays this would be a good date to release our film. We are also going to have a midnight screening – this is because it appeals to the target audience and can make the film more exciting knowing that you were one of the first to view it. As it is the only crime film of this time, our box office figures will be higher and the amount of people talking about our film will also be increased.

8. PROMOTIONAL TOOLS - POSTERS Posters are also a good way of promotion as they can be blown up and placed in places such as motorways, bus stops, poster boards, billboards etc. As our film company is not mainstream we will not be able to put our posters on billboards but we will have them on bus stops and in shopping centres and cinemas etc. We can also very cheaply upload them to the internet and share them on social media sites etc. Posters are a very traditional way of advertising which means they can reach out to the older generation rather than our target audience (TA) but will also generally broaden our TA. We created 3 different posters so that they appealed to each individual. We would have these in all different places – as you can see they all link to each other, meaning the audience can link them up in their heads.

9. Posters On film posters you generally have to have the main character(s), props, tagline, release date, title of the film and credit block. It is important, especially on a crime film, to have if not one but all of the main characters on the poster. This draws in the audience if they are well known and if not it just makes it clear who they will be seeing through the film. Props help to establish the genre. If you see guns and money you are automatically going to assume it is a crime, whereas if you see a spaceship you will assume it is a sci-fi. The tagline also gives an insight to the film – usually the tagline is a bit of a cliff- hanger or slightly confusing which can draw the audience in to find out what it’s all about. The release date, title and credit block are just standard things you have on a poster for information related reasons. In our 3 posters, we have included at least one main character with hints to the others, props such a guns, the title, credit block, release date, awards won and reviews. We have generally followed the conventions of a normal film poster. We have done this as our trailer was confusing enough and we believe that the posters were a good way to reveal the more informative side of our film.

10. PROMOTIONAL TOOLS – MAGAZINE COVERS Having your film on the front of a magazine cover means that you are getting good reviews and this magazine wants to help promote your film. We have chosen to put our film on the sight and sound magazine cover. This is because it is an independent magazine company. We also found that many other magazines from other companies only had one character on the front page, whereas we wanted to have two. The cover should include the main actors looking out towards the audience, reviews, a cover story on the film, other cover stories, and the name of our film. We kept the same colour scheme and sorts of images on our magazine cover as our posters and trailer. We did this so that the audience can interlink the three together and it is recognised easily. We had both the actors staring into the camera so that the viewers could be directly involved and attracted.