How effective is the combination of your main media products & ancilliary texts?
Nadine
Marketing, advertising and distributing our products are essential in the production of our three products, trailer, poster and magazine cover. The process was tiring but worthwhile and it was important that all three products followed conventions but more importantly integrated well together to portray our film as a brand and a well established identity. Branding within films is everything and it can determine whether your film makes a loss (like Bullet Boy) or mass success at the box office films such as the Harry Potter Franchise and "The Dark Knight". It was important that our products worked well together to sync with our audience and that it was promoted using a wide variety of sources to keep up to date with how our audience (mainly young) consumes products.Within our AS year we learnt about the use of cross media promotion, which is where different types of media are used to promote a product. A case study which we focused on was the 2009 Warner Brothers film "The Dark Knight". This was a film that used cross media promotion significantly to convert their product into a brand and grossing their film over $1 billion. They used a wide range of platforms to reach their audience in the creation of a game, a specialised "Dark Knight" edition of an xbox, a sound track phone app. This along with the use of the internet and social networking sites such as facebook and myspace which for a few months had a dark knight theme for the home page. These forms of cross promotion allowed a "hype" to be created for the film well before the due date. This has show us that aswell as using the traditional forms Tv adverts, radio adverts and billboards there is a much wider market.
Although our production company is an independent with a budget not as large and do not have the man power to be a media conglomerate, our comparison to cross media promotion was simply advertising our products on a vast variety of social networking sites such as facebook and twitter espcially as one of our group members is an avid tweeter (Ashley). The use of social networking allowed our products to be distributed quickly and shared amongst a vast amount of people with the ability to share our products on our own facebook pages whilst also sharing the links around, generating our own "hype" for our products. We created our own "hype" by using our blackberry's to broadcast people the link to our trailer through the use of BBM again generating quick distribution. Youtube was also a host to cross promote a film as their video sharing site allows people to access all over the world allowing the video to spread quickly.
As we placed our films website on two of our products it was another effective way in which our products reflected continuity but how we would also cross promote our three ancillary texts. As it would give our audiences a way to keep up to date with the film and with the progression of smartphones and technology our website would be availiable on the go.
The idea of cross promotion has widely enlarged over the recent years with old methods of promotion such as billboards not being the only forms of promotion. As a group however we discussed that using older methods is still a high priority in promotion. Our products all have the same fonts, "DCC distress" downloaded from dafont.com. Due to our use of continuity we feel our products would look good on billboards in places such as bustops, cinema lobbies buses as it would have a professional look as it would be clear that all our products coincide with the same film. However in hindsight we should have perhaps used the same character we had on the poster to be on the magazine over or vice versa to ensure continuity even tighter. On the other hand our products merge together well with the same use of colour and text which we feel is enough.
To ensure we didnt limit ourseves at all in promoting our products we wanted to know what it would be like if our product was consumed using a format such as the i-phone a leader in the smartphone range. To see how this worked we asked one of our audience members to watch our video on their i-phone. Watching the trailer through this method generated the idea that our company should be one that creates an app for our film. This would enable our audience to keep up to date with the current proess of our film as well as giving access to back stage pictures, bloopers etc. As many of our consumers are young it is most likely they will have a smartphone, creating them to obtain the app easily through the use app world and app store. Due to many also being able to watch the teaser trailer quickly on their Blackberry's.
Ashley
As Brand Identity and Continuity also plays a big part in the marketing, advertising and distribuyion process, we made sure tthat we kept this in mind when creating our Main Product and Ancillary Texts. This is because it allows the audience to recognise our different products belong together and are all promoting the same product: Liminal Obsession. We also decided to show an element of continuity throughout our products as this has such a major influence with real big films that are out today.
We demonstrated this element of continuity in mainly two ways: Typography and Visual Style. In terms of typography we used the font 'DCC SharpDistressBlack'. As we felt that we should have our own unique font to go with our horror film, we decided to use DaFont.com to search and download a font that we felt was appropriate for our horror genre. We felt as if it fit with our horror genre because to us it connotes a sense of danger and mystery.
These print screen shots shows the continuity of the font in our main products:
These print screen shots shows the continuity of the font in our ancillary texts:
Saw is a successful horror franchise that uses brand identity/continuity effectively. For instance in terms of typography, we notice it uses the same font throughout all products that are used to advertise it, such as the ancillary texts, video games, rides etc. In terms of it's visual style we can also notice that it follows a colour scheme (red, black, white and brownish/goldish) as well as includes the Saw logo on it's products,
This is the Logo that Lionsgate chose to use
for the Saw horror films
: (notice that there is a also a continuity in the way the letter 'W' is written on all their products.
: (notice that there is a also a continuity in the way the letter 'W' is written on all their products. These are the screen shots that show the continuity of the font throughout the products that promote the films.
This brand identity/continuity is good for Lionsgate as their audience are able to identify specific products are to advertise and promote Saw. This is done by the use of the Saw logo, colour scheme and the font which is the same throughout all their Saw products. This type of marketing has inspired us to have brand identity/continuity for our film as it means that the audience can easily be able to identify our film.
We have also demonstrated an element of continuity in terms of the Visual Style we chose for our horror film. We have done this by having colour in which we kept in mind and included in our main product as well as our ancillary texts. Our colour scheme consists of the colours red, black and white. We chose these colours mainly because of the meanings attached to them. As we produced a horror teaser trailer, we wanted to use colours in which could be associated with the horror genre. Red being one to symbolise death and danger, black symbolising evil and white representing the the innocence of the victims. Having a visual style for our film is good as it also makes the audience familiar with the colours associated with our film.
Another way we demonstrated continuity was by showing the main location of our film in two of our products, the teaser trailer and the poster.
As our film is based on a man that goes around attacking girls then torturing them in his tortue chamber, it would be effective featuring it on the poster as there is an attached meaning as to why it is there. We also felt if our audience were watching our teaser trailer and watched the tilt shots of part of the torture chamber they will hopefully feel unsettled, therefore this will have a greater impact when they see the poster because they will remember the shots of the torture chamber from the teaser trailer and feel quite creeped out. Our group felt as if this type of continuity is good as it shows that the torture chamber plays a big role in our film.
Having our production logo on two of our products; the poster and the teaser trailer is also another way that showed how we used brand identity/continuity. We did this because it shows that these two products belong to the same production company and are promoting the same product. We also did this because we thought it's a good way of familiarising our audience with our production company as well as logo.
The following screen shots show the production company logos for some horror film teaser trailers as well as our production logo in our teaser trailer.
The images below shows some posters for the above horror films with their production logos on them as well as our poster with our production logo on it.
As many films including horror films always have their production logo on their teaser trailers and posters to promote that particular film, we thought it would be wise to follow this brand identity/continuity as to make our final products appear more professional.
Another way in which we demonstrated brand identity/continuity is by having our film tagline featured in the teaser trailer and on the poster. We mainly did this because we believe it will help our audience become familiar with all our products and how they are promoting the same film. Also because we believe exposing our tagline to our audience by having it on our teaser trailer and poster will help them remember our film everytime that the tagline or something similar is mentioned or when they see it advertised somewhere.
We also used Intertexuality in some of our texts. The first being the captions and how they have a resemblence with the youtube logo. This is mainly interms of the colour that we decided to use for our captions and how it is similar to the colours on the youtube logo. Another way in which we used intertextaulity is by choosing'Your mind is the scene of the crime' as our tagline.
This is because like shown in these two screen shots, it was used by the 'Inception' trailer as a caption. As our storyline is based on dreams and the idea of entering one's dreamworld we decided to use the tagline in the hopes that our audience will recognise the relationship between the two texts. This is because we as a group felt as if the two had a psychological link. Elis
The use of social media for cross promotion was used to promote our teaser trailer, it was very useful because it was cheap but effective. It allowed us to reach a larger audience and it’s a quick method of promoting a teaser trailer. Since this was a media project it made sense to use technology as much as possible to promote our teaser trailer. We used a lot of platforms such as Facebook, twitter, Youtube and blackberry messenger . We used new technology within these sites to get our video out to as many people as possible such as sharing our videos with many people at once and also putting videos up on people’s “walls” on Facebook so that their friends could see it this is very useful when people have thousands of friends who could also share it if they liked it. We found out that twitter was very useful because people are coming off Facebook and joining twitter especially in recent months and it’s even easier to “retweet” a video which is like sharing something on Facebook. Blackberry messenger was one of the easiest ways to share this information because within a click of a button it allowed me to broadcast our teaser trailer to my whole contact list which reached them within milli seconds.
This was an important aspect of our project because without this people wouldn’t have been able to view our teaser trailer also relevant feedback wouldn’t have been received without the views. So this was key in getting information on how to improve on the video if we were to do another or for future references/teaser trailers for any one. This could be the difference between a big blockbuster or an Indie film. If we look at Kidulthood we would see they only made £600,000 gross profit however even after Adulthood didn’t get as much of a buzz from it, it grossed over £3,000,000 just because it was promoted on a higher scale and cross media promotion was accomplished with a bigger budget and
properly.
In the poster and magazine we used some synergy to keep the theme consistant. Factors such as the colour we used for our font, “LIMINAL OBSESSION” on the poster is the same colour we used on our magazine and this goes well because this is what the audience familiarise our teaser trailer with. People can tell that both of these media promotions are linked and it will make our teaser trailer look professional. The importance of having the same theme is important for our teaser trailer because it gives it identity and recognition it should be easy for people to recognise our brand however if we could go back to making our posters and magazine front covers we would have had a logo making it even easier to recognise our theme. It was crucial little factors such as fonts were concentrated on because it adds to the effect of horror was well. The colour scheme was quite similar in the fact that in both the poster and front cover or magazine there was low key lighting used because it gives it the same feel rather than it looking like two different teaser trailers.
Lekan Akanni:
Continuity: is consistency of the characteristics of persons, plot, objects, places and events seen by the reader or viewer over some period of time. It is of relevance to several media.
Continuity: is consistency of the characteristics of persons, plot, objects, places and events seen by the reader or viewer over some period of time. It is of relevance to several media.
Across our 3 products continuity was shown in various ways for example our teaser trailer consisted of:
- Protagonist
- Antagonist
We showed continuity by including the protagonist as the main focus of the poster and including the antagonist as the main focus of the magazine; as you can see below with our 2 media products.
Also by looking at the magazine front cover the image is of the antagonist holding his iconic weapon we showed continuity by including the iconic weapon at the beginning of the trailer which is also one of the typical teaser trailers convention.
Iconic weapon both in the teaser trailer and magazine front cover.
Moving on other areas where we showed continuity was the font used. The font we used for the poster, magazine and captions for the teaser trailer was all the same; the font we used was dcc sharp distress black from www.dafont.com .
Dcc Sharp Distress Black
Dcc Sharp Distress Black
-
Dcc Sharp Distress Black
-
In our teaser trailer there are shots of our agonist in specific costume one piece of costume consisted of our agonist wearing a grey vest top we showed continuity by dressing up our agonist in this grey vest top and taking pictures of our protagonist to use as the main focus/picture of our poster.
Same costume
No comments:
Post a Comment