1. How effective is the combination
of your main product and the
ancillary texts?
Annie Roebuck

2. Ancillary Texts
An ancillary text is vital in the process of distributing a film. It is a
way of appealing to a wider audience because the audience is the
main importance. Otherwise the film industry just wouldn’t be as
successful as it is.
We had to create two ancillary texts to appeal to the audience we
have chosen to aim our film towards. The audience being under 30
but 16+ and fans of a good thriller film. The products had to,
obviously, be about the film we created but to not let anyone know
too much information. It needed to be as secretive as the characters
involved.
Although we had many forms of advertising to choose from, we
chose to create a poster for advertisement and a radio trailer as our
ancillary texts
We knew just what to involve, after some research, in our ancillary
texts to appeal to a wider audience.

3. Poster
Posters can be extremely effective in that they can appeal to a larger
audience. They can be seen in bus stops, cinemas, online, billboards,
shops and other public places. There is a vast amount of different
people going to these places therefore it is imperative to get a poster
just right to catch a potential viewers keen eye.
I chose to look at posters from similar thriller films in order to get an
idea of what poster to create. This meant looking at title fonts,
colour schemes, graphics and photographs used. Even taglines
because a tagline is vital to the advertising of the film on the poster.
It is, after all, the only words you can use to almost ‘sell’ the film to
an audience.
I looked at posters for films such as ‘Pulp Fiction’ and ‘The
Godfather’ for inspiration and to analyse.

4. From looking a posters on Blogger I realised that many of them have
small aspects in common. These are the aspects that I wanted to
take into consideration when planning and designing my own poster.
I feel that my most in depth analysis was of the ‘Pulp Fiction’ poster. I
looked into when the poster was released and what contributing
aspects complete the poster to make it as successful as it was.
This is a screenshot of the
analysis I completed on the blog
we created.
Here, I have said that when a
film has huge stars and co-stars
in the movie, they tend to list
their names.
We are creating our film as if to
be an independent movie so
there wouldn’t be any big names
in it so this is something we
wouldn’t do on our poster.

5. So after analysing posters I then needed to create my own as an
ancillary text.
This is the poster that I designed for the final
poster. The text is large and blotchy to indicate
that the situation that The Employer is in or is
to put another in, is a big situation that has a
negative aspect involved.
I included the most important parts of the film
on the poster such as the walking stick, the box
and The Employer himself. His face is blank to
indicate to an audience that he must remain
anonymous. The box is blazing because it is the
object that brings Kyle and The Employer
together in the film and is important because
of that.
At the bottom of the poster I have included the
regulation of the film; A 15. This is based on
the basic BBFC censorship guidelines.
This is a basic sketch and not the final poster.

6. The Poster
The photograph we used was
taken in The Employers ‘office’
from the film. We had him hiding
his face in order to create the
anonymity I wanted to create in
the poster I sketched.
We tried to include a small
amount of religious connotations
in the poster. The first being that
The Employers hand is held up,
like he’s almost praying for
whatever reason. His shadow
looks extremely large and we
wanted to create this effect due
to it almost being a god-like
image. It also has a sense of
foreboding due to the shadow
effect being used when Kyle is
murdered at the end of the film.
We created a reference to the
last film we made at the top of
the poster which is something
that is done frequently so that
audiences can say that, if they
liked the previous film, they
might like this one.
Another thing we included was a
tagline. The Tagline is a line from the
other ancillary text we created; radio
trailer. Using this gives the audience to
bring the two ancillary texts together
because they’ll recognise the line.
This, we all agreed, would be an
independent film so due to this we
have created comments from famous
film magazines and large cinemas. This
is a way to attract a larger audience.
The regulation of the film was put on to create the look of an authentic film poster.
All film posters have the certificate on because otherwise, they wouldn’t look like a
genuine film poster.

7. Evaluation of the film poster
Personally, I like the film poster we all created as a group. I think it has the thriller look
which we all wanted to create. Obviously it wouldn’t be successful if the poster said
fantasy and we showed an audience a thriller film so due to this reason It definitely works.
I think the poster could have been improved by changing the amount of stars each
company had ‘given’ the film because then, I feel, it would have looked more genuine. I
like that at the top of the poster there is the reference to the previous film we created in
last years studies. This brings the two films together and audiences will recognise this.
I think that the poster we
created is similar to The
Godfather poster on that
it is a very dark, very
secretive poster. They
both contain the same
themes such as suites,
anonymity, darkness and
basically, no information.

8. Radio Trailer
Radio trailers can be also be extremely effective in that they can
appeal to a larger audience; like a poster can. They can be heard on a
variety of different radio stations. There is a vast amount of different
people listening to the vast amount of radio trailers there is. The
radio can be listened to anywhere; In the car, at home, on a mobile
device. This is a way of advertising to people in their own
comfortable surroundings.
It is a very secretive way of advertising in that audiences don’t know
that they’re being advertised anything because they’ll think they're
just listening to the radio.
To research radio trailers, I had to listen out when listening to the
radio to see what kind of films are getting advertised. It became
clear that this was very hard to do because there are many other
advertisements on the radio.

9. When it came to designing my own radio trailer I found that it was
difficult to write about when there is no visual evidence so on my
Blogger post I just basically explain what it could be like.
The writing at the bottom in italics is what I wanted the voiceover to briefly say. It is
short and snappy and straight to the point. This is the tagline I would have like on the
poster too. As a group we mixed all our ideas together and came to a final decision. I
liked that me and my group can work well as a team and decide what would be best
for our production.
We all thought it’d be a good idea to involve The Employer in the radio trailer and have
him talking about the revenge that he is about to commit against Kyle and we all
planned this speech together.

10. The final radio trailer can be heard here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-nQ_7Ie1Vk
We put a black page with a title over it so that any audience members wanting to listen
to this radio trailer, can, knowing what it is and what it is for. I think the audience will
listen to this trailer and understand the film, it’s genre and what is to come in the film. I
think that the audience aren’t revealed too much about the film and they’ll be
pleasantly surprised after watching the film. I like that throughout the trailer there is
links and a sense of foreboding as to what is due to come in the film.
Radio is a brilliant way to advertise the audience because, as I have previously stated,
they will not know they are being advertised to. They’ll hear this trailer and maybe
think they want to see it, maybe they’ll think they won’t. But either way, they’ll know
about it.

11. Ancillary texts
Overall, I believe that ancillary texts are the perfect way to attract an
audience to a film. They reach a large number of people in a large
number of ways. Posters and radio trailers are the two forms of
advertising that reach the vast majority of potential audience
members and for that reason, I think we have succeeded in
completing two ancillary texts.