The document discusses how the creator incorporated synergy between a teaser trailer, film poster, and magazine cover promoting the same text. Key elements like background, font, text, and images were carried over between the pieces to strengthen their connection. The background, font, and main character image were most successfully synced up, while incorporating the genre-defining abandoned school setting into the magazine cover posed a challenge. Overall, balancing professional quality with conveying the sci-fi genre across all pieces could have improved the synergy further.

1. How effective is the combination of your main products and ancillary texts? The three pieces of work which we produced for the project needed to all tie together in some way, in order to feel as if they were all promoting the same text. In order to achieve this synergy, we incorporated features we had originally used in our teaser trailer into our ancillary texts.

2. Background To convey the genre of our trailer, we had used a starry background for the titles: We created a starry background again for our film poster and magazine cover. This strengthened the synergy between the three products as the background on both of our ancillary texts is clearly visible (e.g. is not hidden by lots of images) and along with the images used is one of the focal points. Using the same background on all three pieces of work was therefore a strong way of reinforcing both the genre of the text and that all three pieces are linked and promoting the same text.

3. Background Continued… The synergy between the products using the background could have been further improved if we had kept all three backgrounds the same colour. However, we change the colour of the background from black to purple on our magazine cover as we felt that purple looked more effective combined with the other colours we had used on the cover. Despite changing the colour of the background, when designing the magazine cover we knew that the background would be important in creating synergy with the other two products and therefore was always a key part to our design. This can be seen in our early experiments and initial ideas.

4. Font In order to connect the three pieces of work, we aimed to use the same font on all of them. We found the font which we felt was most effective for the genre and text we were trying to promote when editing and creating the titles for our trailer in IMovie. This font was ‘Helvetica’. We used ‘Helvetica’ again for all the text on our film poster. We also kept the font white, like in the teaser trailer as this contrasted well to the black background we had used both on this and in the trailer.

5. Font Continued When creating our magazine cover however, we immediately knew that we would have to incorporate other fonts and colours. We had to do this as we had based our design on the existing film magazine ‘Empire’ and so therefore had to find a font that most resembled the one used on that magazine, as well as following their colour scheme. The font colour used for the magazine title is usually red and so this is the colour which we used for our title. We also based our magazine cover around being a “sci-fi special” and so changed some of the text indicating this to green as this colour is typically linked to this genre. We did however, keep the majority of the text white to keep the synergy with the other two products. To strengthen this synergy further, we had aimed to have the name of the film on the magazine cover in the same font which we had used for the titles in the film trailer and on the film poster, ‘Helvetica’. However, we found that this font did not blend well with the “Empire” font and did not make the magazine cover look effective or professional. We therefore had to experiment with other fonts until we found one which was suitable. There was therefore no ‘Helvetica’ font on our magazine cover.

6. Text We took text from the titles in our teaser trailer to create a tagline for our film poster. Doing this explicitly connected the two products. We incorporated the repeated phrase “They have” from our trailer into the tagline to do this even more. Teaser trailer titles Film poster tagline

7. Text Continued After examining many Empire magazine covers we found that the tagline of the film the issue was promoting was not included on the cover. We therefore did not include our tagline on our magazine cover. Instead we focused on genre to establish links to the other two products. We noticed that it was common to theme issues of the magazine around a certain genre e.g. “The Ultimate Action Special” in June 2010. We therefore based our magazine cover around being a “Sci-fi Special”. This meant that all text on the cover could relate back to the genre of sci-fi and subsequently the text we were trying to promote. We even incorporated this idea into the micro aspects of the magazine such as the magazine tagline, changing it from “The World’s Biggest Movie Magazine” to “The Galaxy's Biggest Movie Magazine” to fit in with the sci-fi genre. We also used the same shadow effect that we used for the tagline on the film poster on some of the text on the magazine cover. One obvious way In which all three pieces of work are linked using text is by each including the name of the film, “Visitors”.

8. Image Both our film poster and magazine cover include images of the protagonist from our teaser trailer. The synergy between the teaser trailer and film poster is further strengthened by the images on the film poster being taken in locations where scenes from the teaser trailer were filmed. This means that not only characters but locations and scenery will be recognisable to the audience. This then continues onto the magazine cover as we took one of the images from the poster, edited out the background and used this on the magazine cover. Therefore not only is the character generally recognisable but the exact same image is. Location from trailer into film poster Image from film poster onto magazine cover

9. Image Continued The two main aspects to our teaser trailer are the protagonist and the abandoned school. We therefore wanted to include both of these aspects in our ancillary texts. We achieved this with our film poster as we incorporated a large image of the abandoned school as the main focal point to accompany the smaller images at the bottom of the poster, which included images of our protagonist. We were not as successful in incorporating both aspects onto our magazine cover however. We knew that in order to fit in with the look of an ‘Empire’ magazine cover an image of our protagonist had to be the main focal point but the synergy between the magazine cover and the other two products could have been improved if we had included an image of the building somewhere, even if it was just in the background.

10. Image Continued We wanted the images we used on our ancillary texts to convey the genre of the text, to retain synergy with our teaser trailer. This could possibly have been improved on our film poster. While the images used do incorporate both key aspects from the trailer, they could have conveyed the genre more. We experimented with images which would have done this, such as an image of the school building with a meteorite coming towards it. An image like this would have been more effective in conveying the sci-fi genre, creating synergy with the trailer. However, we did not feel that we could make the image look professional enough with our level of Photoshop skills and so therefore felt that if would be more effective to go for a simpler image. This however compromised the synergy with the trailer.