media

1. HOW EFFECTIVE IS THE
COMBINATION OF YOUR MAIN
PRODUCT AND ANCILLARY TASKS?
PHYSICAL SIMILARITIES
By Josh Coe

2. MY TASKS
This year, I had to create three products in total, the main one being my short film and the ancillary tasks
being a magazine review and a film poster.
Throughout these products, I tried to ensure that I related everything to the genre of my film in order to
create a similar look between them all. With my film poster this was very easy because I had complete
freedom with the design of the film poster. As you can see from on the home page of my website, my film
poster has a general dark theme which relates to my genre of a horror/thriller, and as a whole I think that
my poster works well with the general idea of my film.
However, with the magazine review I had to create it was harder to relate it to the genre of my film
because I had to follow the layout scheme of IndieWire, which was the website I decided to base the
review on. The only thing I could really match with the genre was the picture I used on the review, but as
a whole although the review doesn’t follow the theme of my genre as much it stills meets conventions of
actual magazine reviews as I ‘ve spoken about in question 1.

3. COLOUR SCHEME
Above I have compared all three of my products to talk about the colour scheme throughout. Generally, I hope it is clear that I aimed to have
everything very dark, helping to relate to the horror/thriller genre I have. From looking at all of the products together, you can see that the
poster appears a lot darker than the screenshot from the actual film. This is because I had a lot more freedom with the poster and could use
darker colours with the visibility still being good. However, with the film I had to consider lighting, and filming in very dark areas wouldn’t of
been beneficial because it would reduce visibility and therefore the quality of my film. Instead, I used the location as a dark and sinister
alleyway to help represent the genre more, and where possible used more darker shots such as the hooded figure in the alleyway, and
changing some of the death reactions into black and white to help bring the colour scheme together. As for the magazine review, as
mentioned before the general layout of IndieWire restricted me to the colours I could actually used, and so I used an image from my film that
kept with the darkening colours.

4. TYPOGRAPHY
Typography can be a very important factor across different products. A film can be easily recognisable because of
a font and this can help it in terms of promotions. Generally, this is more useful with films that intend to have more
then one installment as the font can be recognised across all of the films. However, for short independent films
that only intend to create the one film, the font consistency throughout isn’t always as important. For my products,
the typography only really mattered with my film poster and the actual short film. As you can see from the
pictures, the font style differs slightly. I kept the size and colour the same to remain consistency in some way, but
decided that these two fonts worked better in the two different scenarios. Although this doesn’t make them
completely consistent, I feel as though it still works well and the general image of the white font on a black
background will be what audiences remember the typography for being.

5. STRENGTHS/WEAKNESSES
Strengths:
- Colour scheme relates well to the genre to create the dark sinister theme
- Magazine review meets conventions whilst trying to keep the theme consistent with the
dark image used
- Actresses face on poster has been edited well so it stands but still works with the dark
theme
Weaknesses:
- Font style varies from poster to film (however I still believe it works)
- Magazine review is bright (had to meet with conventions

6. OVERALL
As a whole, I think that the three products work well together in
terms of their physical aspects. I think they create what would be a
good promotional package and each have features that stand out
and would be something easily recognisable for people. Although
there are some things that don’t work within my products, such as
the style of text, I believe that because my film is only a small
independent, the little things like text styles are not as important,
and people will see your product as a general theme, and in my
case it works very well with theme being dark and sinister.