The document discusses a student's coursework which involved creating a film trailer along with ancillary materials including a film poster and magazine cover. The student analyzed existing horror genre posters and magazine covers to understand conventions. For the poster, they chose a key image from the film and used colors like black, white or red that are associated with horror. The magazine cover included a large central image, titles and subtitles. Both the poster and magazine cover featured a masked character from the film to pique audience interest and attract viewers while clearly communicating the horror genre.

2. Our a2 media studies coursework required me to make a film
trailer which would go together with an ancillary task of making
a film poster and magazine cover for the film. Our chosen genre
was horror. We put the conventions of a horror film and the
unique selling point for our audience into the three products. We
did this in order to make the audience more interested in the
product, but also to expand our audience and attract more
people. Our main goal for the ancillary texts was to portray
clearly the genre of the film, and to give the audience a small
insight into what the film is about. Another thing we wanted to
achieve was to make it clear what audience we were targeting,
which was teenagers of both sexes aged 15-19

3. We tried to make our main product and our ancillary
texts link together as much as possible. We did this
in a number of ways. We used a number of different
parts of our film to make the links between our
ancillary texts, for example we used things that
would be easily recognisable for the target audience
to link like the masks which are very distinctive.

4. First of all we created a poster, which I did a lot of in
depth research in to posters of the same genre to see
what the conventions where. The film poster that i
analysed was Friday the 13th. I found that the
conventions of horror posters were that the base colour
was often one colour, most likely black, white or red, as
these are colours associated with horror films. The
posters also usually contain an image that is key in the
film, for example a main character or object that makes
the audience wonder what it is about. The Friday the 13th
poster that I analysed is also where I gained some
inspiration from.

5. Here is another poster I
analysed

6. Magazine cover
I also researched a lot in to magazine covers, of both
horror genre and not. I found a number of differences
and similarities between all magazine covers. There
is usually always a big titles, a large image covering
the majority, if not all of the cover, and a number of
sub titles down the sides of the images, sometimes
at the bottom. Here is an image that me and my
group created showing the usual convention of a
magazine front cover.

8. Our magazine cover

9. Our magazine cover involved an image of a masked
man that features through out the film, and are the
main characters. We chose to use this image as it is
easy to recognise for the target audience. In addition
to this we thought that this image would attract
people who do not necessarily know what the film is
about because the image is mysterious and
intriguing.

10. In conclusion…
Overall I believe that our ancillary texts are linked
well with our film trailer, we have used a number of
different images, fonts and colour schemes to make
them all link together, and also attract the target
audience at the same time.