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

The film and media distributors have three sections in which to focus on when trying to make their film successful, these three sections are; Advertising, Promotion and Publicity. The advertising itself is the trailer and poster. The trailer will be shown before films in the cinemas to become of interest to cinema-goers. The trailer and teaser trailer will also be shown on TV adverts breaks, as this is a prime time for when families and/or their target audience will be focused and attracted to the trailer. The teaser trailer would be shown around summer time so it allows the audience to be teased into going to watch the film at an early stage and entice the audience to go watch it as soon as it comes out. This means that audiences will be interested and would be visiting the websites to try and gain further insight. This advertising campaign is similar to that of  'Paranormal Activity' where the distributors uploaded the trailers onto the website and got audience feedback and included them in later trailers. The poster would be shown in cinemas along with bus stops, billboards, shopping centres from around Autumn time so that the film is once again noticeable and reminds people to have tickets booked as it won't be long till its release date. Publicity would contain the magazine as it is not run by the film or film distribution company which means it has an external opinion on the film. By putting the film title and information on the front cover means it is of high interest at the time that this magazine is published and then is uncontrolled by the film company . This method should prove costly for the distribution company as it could flop or increase interest. The promotion campaigns to a film being distributed are the interviews given by directors, actors, film editors etc and the masses of  merchandising  which are all things that the film company can control and can prove very profitable in the long run. The interviews not only featured in the magazine but on TV shows would be aspects of both promotional and publicity as the interviews themselves would be set up by the film company. The interview(s) would consist of many questions asked and responses which could attract higher levels of interest from wider audiences depending on the questions asked and responses given. These would all help the promotional and publicity sides of the film campaign.

The trailer is in my view the most important part of the distribution campaign but others may not agree. They are largest marketing technique when it comes to marketing and distributing the film because of the way the teaser trailer itself shows the best parts of the film without given too much away to their audience and therefore not spoiling the plot, endings or twist. Horror trailers use many ways in which they attract audiences and generate new ones, common ones are things such as dating the release of the film for a school holiday or a popular day of the year like for example our release date is The Omen, which was released on the 6/6/2006 which shortened makes 666, which is the biblical number of the beast,  they used a range of actors and actresses as well as well known/ successful directors for that specific genre of film (John Moore director of The Omen).  Other things that may attract audiences to watch the films could be the advances in technology at the cinema such as 3D like Drive Angry 3D which has just been released and is set to be very successful because of it being shown in 3D.

The poster is horror like and eery as it displays little colour and and little of the film or villain but displays it as evil and quite calm at the same time which is ideal for the horror genre as it creates an un-settling feeling. The poster uses a creepy twist on a child rhyme which attracts the audience and makes them in to want to know more about the film. The rhyme keeps the audience interested as it suggests that it involves children in some way, the children involved are  shown in the trailer, but not i a way in which the audience would be able to guess what is going on. The poster is a lot harder in terms of trying to sum up the main points of the film including storyline, characters, genre and themes whilst also trying to grab the readers attention. The poster needs to be effective and yet simplistic as the audience might only catch a glance at it so having too many words or images on the poster may prove too confusing and distract the reader from the films main points. I used Photoshop to create my poster this was a good way to generate the poster because it gave the poster and magazine covers a professional look whilst achieving it in an effective manner. This could all be possible due to the wide selection on tools, colour changers, contrast effects and font styles i had available.

The magazine also plays a big part of the publicity work. It can attract audiences that may not have been to cinema recently or people that would not normally watch that genre of movie whilst also familiarising normal cinema goers with the directors, actors or story lines that may be familiar and recognizable with them and also people who enjoy the horror genre. I  stuck with a magazine layout and format which will be familiar with existing cinema goers which is that of Empire, I knew this would be effective because its most likely one of the biggest selling movie magazines worldwide (as stated on the tagline of 'the worlds biggest movie magazine') and contains a wide range of genres. So to not make my issue look out of place I decided to keep with the Empire approach and have other genre movies featured on the cover of the magazine. My magazine would be aimed at cinema goers aged roughly between 16- 25 and contain exclusive interviews and reviews of the latest film releases.