Evaluation 2

Question 2

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

A marketing campaign can be vital to our film, and to attract an audience to the media product we created our ancillary tasks, which take the form of our film posters and review. A poster and review are important parts of a campaign. They all share a relationship with each other to entice the audience. The posters are used to raise questions about the film, capturing the audience’s attention. The review then answers some of those questions and then the audience use the film to see the whole picture.
When creating my ancillary tasks it was important I kept to a house style that matched my film, which also communicates the genres to a clear target audience. Which in my case focuses on young women, similar to Delilah’s character age who I found from research into genre’s audience’s are most likely to be drawn to our film. Also the moral of the story applies mostly to this audience. This made my ancillary tasks an effective combination with ‘String Along’.
My posters are a series of three. During there creation I considered the colour scheme, in which I used reds, whites and pinks. This was to emphasise the key genres of the film. From my poster research I saw common conventions it drama and romance films, such as the red bold text I used similar to ‘The Great Gatsby’ and ‘Cat on the Tin Roof’ and general colour scheme. Although my feedback from my posters was that my more modern poster (poster three) would be more appealing to the audience as because of the others being based on older film poster layouts and colour schemes they matched the current conventions of a romance poster less. On reflection using too many different fonts and the use of the pink made my poster a less effective combination to my film. Although I also feel I effectively portrayed Delilah in the campaign.
By using Delilah’s image in every poster I can convey that she is the main character and of the most importance in the film. I decided against using images of the two men apart from in my third poster to show what they represent to Delilah, by only showing her the audience can establish our film is her story. The use of her posed image in poster two is unlike the typical convention of a romance film poster which uses in various ways a couple image, or represents two main characters. Films such as Casablanca , Australia, Remember me, Dear John and Away We Go are all different forms of a romance and use this convention of a couple image. However from seeing this I believe it was more suitable to the film to only show Delilah’s character, as the boyfriends don’t represent love or affection to her, and the audience can understand the film’s plot is about who Delilah is, and what happens to her, rather than her relationship with the men. Inspired by posters like Clockwork Orange, 500 Days of summer, and Gatsby I wanted to combined the abstract element of the film, with the drama. For this I used images of both Delilah with the strings and posed photos of her in posters one and two. The images I felt created an ominous feeling to the poster. These posters were aimed more for a film enthusiast audience, who I felt would find appeal in our film for the abstract elements. The taglines of the fortunes ‘strings of false love will break’ and ‘the price of greed is loneliness’ also highlighted the Chinese based themes in the film. These both fit with the films representation well.
My review is also important to the distribution of my film, it needed to sell my film to my target audience of young women and film enthusiasts. My use of language reflected this as I wrote in a similar tone to my Empire magazine examples, however I used less film ‘lingo’ and references as to be accessible to an average audience too. Building a relationship with my audience and the film. My review can also help me advertise to the industry as well, but highlight it as an independent film, suggesting its strengths and weaknesses as a product and helping the film maker become known in the industry. As a whole my ancillary tasks and review needed to be presented as a brand image. By using a house style throughout and presenting the themes of the film to both the industry and my target audience, my campaign has a highly effective combination with the main product, my only weakness was using elements of an older poster in my own series.