Evaluation Pt.2

Evaluation Pt.2

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

When creating my movie poster, I took inspiration from film posters I had already seen and noted what made a movie poster successful. I wasn’t a fan of overly complicated and busy posters, I think that too many pictures and text ion a poster can make it look messy and detract away from what it is trying to convey. I chose to keep my poster simple, with minimal text so people could take in all the information about the film that they needed with just a quick glance. I chose low key lighting and when photographing the image for the movie poster, I made sure that there was a deep shadow on one side of the subject to make the poster look menacing, dark and sinister. I dressed the subject in the same grubby and dirty shirt that we had used to film our trailer so the character of Keith would be recognisable. He looks particularly grubby which is what we were going for, we wanted a gritty and grubby character that would really shock people in the film and I feel we have achieved this. The fonts were carefully chosen for the poster as well, I chose the main title font because of its background that contained numbers and letters and symbols, which almost look like a police report. This connects with Keith’s previous job as a police officer, and gives the viewer clues to his background and the narrative. The tagline gives the viewer clues to how far Keith will go to get his revenge, and like the title font, it gives the viewer clues to Keith's police force past. A poster that this could be compared to is Henry: Portrait Of A Serial Killer (1986), both poster feature the title and a picture of the main character and not much else, this also fits well because Henry: Portrait Of A Serial Killer was a main inspiration for the making of Keith, the content of both posters help to categorise both of the films in the same sub-genre of horror.

 












With my magazine cover, I decided to feature Keith on the cover of Empire magazine. I kept the Empire font the same, as well as the barcode position and taglines so it kept within the house style of Empire, and this would enable the magazine to be instantly recognisable at a glance to the target audience. I chose to write about the influences of Keith so horror fans would instantly be able to place the film, and would know whether they would be interested in watching the film or not, and I also included an article that would really connect with the older generation of horror fans who had seen their favourite horror films be remade on multiple occasions. I wanted to create an article that horror fans would really be interested in that would draw them to the magazine. I used the same image from my movie poster on the magazine cover so people who had already seen the poster would instantly recognise the magazine cover, and this would make them want to read more about Keith and what the narrative included etc. A magazine cover that is similar to mine is the Empire: The Greatest Horror Movies Ever special edition cover. This includes the standard font title and tagline, but only has the article title and pictures to do with the article, making it look simple and straight to the point, which is what I wanted to achieve with my magazine cover.

 

My poster and magazine tie in with the style and look of my trailer very well. My trailer is very gritty and very real, I wanted to achieve this with the movie poster and the magazine cover, and I achieved this by the dress of the main subject, his clothes and his whole look and the way the photo has been taken (taking the showy areas and the low key lighting into account) portrays a gritty look, and gives clues to what the film is about and how it is shot. I chose to use a different font on the front cover of the magazine to the one I used on the poster as I wanted to keep in with Empire’s house style, and I felt that the font I used on the movie poster did not fit into this criteria. I chose Empire magazine because I wanted to target the film at a more mainstream audience, and hopefully show them a grittier and more down to earth horror film than they were used to.