How Effective is the Combination of Your Main Product and Ancillary Texts?

For most major films, the distributor makes something called a 'Promotion Package'. This package is a collective group of adverts to make the film a big success including: Magazine Articles, Posters, Billboard Advertisments, Television/Cinema Adverts and even screening their adverts at the start of Cinema Films. 

A movie trailer is very important in promoting a film but it is not the key factor. A magazine cover page/article in one of the leading film magazines will get a film noticed, especially by your target audience. Also producing a poster will increase the number of people who notice the film. This poster can be placed up and around cinemas and can also be blown and printed on cardboard to stand up tall as a cinemas 'next biggest film'.

For the promotion package to be a success, the three media texts (Trailer, Poster and Magazine Cover) need to link together in terms of styling and content. "The Necklace" teaser trailer contains a fair amount of green which is quite distinctive to horror films so I tried to incorperate this into my other media texts. After experimenting with the colour green, I came to the conclusion that focusing on the same colour across all of my media texts would be too much. This gave me the idea of using the main antagonist to link the poster and magazine cover and the colour green to link to my trailer and magazine cover.

The images that I have used in my magazine cover and poster are fairly low key and they do show most of the main antagonist. With the woman in the trailer looking dead and quite creepy and the woman in the poster and magazine cover looking normal and sane; This gives the viewer a chance to see the character as a normal person casually wearing her necklace like any other piece of jewlery. The facial expression also helps to justify the horror genre as she is very sinister looking. If I had used other editing techniques such as enhancing the brightness and the colours then the film could have been interpreted as a different genre e.g. a comedy or romance.

My trailer doesn't have any production values such as big named stars or well-known directors so I have not included any names in the titles of the trailer, poster and magazine cover. I came to this conclusion after taking into account my target audience and the fact that they will not know the actors/actresess and directors. To make up for the lack of production values, I have included big named films and events on the magazine cover such as "The Oscars" and I have also included "movie ratings" from top magazines and newspapers on my poster and this will help to sell the magazines as lots of people will want to hear about these new films with their famous stars.