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

2. The chosen genre of our short film is social realism therefore we watched some
social realism films both feature and short films to get an idea of what the
conventions of the films were. We then researched the films posters to see how
the producers created a synergy between the two as we could choose to make a
poster as our ancillary task. As a group we chose to focus on the film ‘Fish Tank’ as
a guide as this film best related to our films protagonist and plot.

3. Our main protagonist Lola is a middle class teenage girl who attends a comprehensive
school in a urban area. Lola’s home life affects her entirely as she is surrounded by
domestic violence and whilst being in the midst of violence she then isolates her self from
her friends resorting into violence her self. The main themes of our film are violence and
isolation as we felt that these subject matters are stereotypical of the social realism genre.

4. When making our film review we used the
layout and content of ‘Total Film’ as we felt that
this signifies a social realism theme to the review
and would be effective when representing our
film and review together.
The images we used on our poster anchor our
two main themes of isolation and violence that
are portrayed in our film. The main image heavily
represents isolation as Lola is walking on her
own troubled in thought and our sub-image
highlights the start of a conflict with Lola’s
victims.
Our layout and the theme that we have used on
our review also correlates with our protagonist
in the film as she is a middle class white girl. This
is represented with the sleek black and white
effect we have.

5. When making our poster as our second ancillary product we again decided to focus on
‘Fish Tank’ as a guide of layout, image and colours. ‘Fish Tank’ has a strong corresponding
link between their film and film poster. Therefore we decided to use their ideas as
inspiration to make something similar but also have our own spin on our products.

6. Our main product relates to our poster as our image
portrays our character feeling isolated and wanting to
escape her life. This is emphasised in our film at the end
when our protagonist is seen speaking a monologue and
expresses that she should go away with her mum to get
away from the violence.
The colours of the poster are used to represent a middle
class effect on the background and the image. This is
represented through Lola’s costume as her uniform looks
clean and out of the window in the background you can see
council estate houses which are urban but not derilict. In
the film this is also represented as the characters look from
a middle class background and also our choice of mise-en-
scene such as setting was based in a middle class area as
this was what was available.

7. The combination of our main product and ancillary texts is effective as they all link
together through our subject matter and themes of our film which are violence
and isolation. We represented this fully by using different forms of media to help
us and by researching and planning ideas. However I think that we could have used
more of a focus on violence and isolation with in the review article. This would
have anchored the combination of all three products more effectively. On the
other hand I think that overall we create a synergy between all three by portraying
the same subject matters throughout.