Evaluation Part 2.

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

In order to increase the combined effectiveness of both my main product and ancillary text, I had to intertwine the styles and aspects from one to the other in order to create consistency and make sure each attracted my desired target audience in a coherent marketing strategy.

For my poster, for example, I gave the image a low key “grunge” lighting effect, which I utilised using various techinques within Photoshop, - in order to get across that this film will be dark and gritty. This also helped reflect the stark, low key lighting I used within the trailer itself to add a dark atmosphere. I also chose the location of the posters image carefully in order to further enhance the feel of the trailer, as the image on the poster is taken up against a simple yet degraded wall - further adding to the effect of a very gritty film. The intention was to leave the audience wondering, "where is the film taking place?" so adds a further layer of interest and curiosity.

The image on the poster itself is an expressionist angle, being a close up of one of the zombie’s mouths. The slight low angle creates a sense of power, while the extreme close-up intentionally invades the viewer’s personal space. For example, the Hostel Part III poster uses a similar affect in order to "Invade" the audiences space.The construction of mise-en-scene was equally important, with blood and vomit dripping from the teeth and mouth. This really helps express the feel of the specific type of horror we were aiming for, a more grindhouse feel reminiscent of "Planet Terror" and "Dawn of the Dead" (1978).

For the magazine cover for Empire, I went for the same basic approach as with the poster - which was a dark, slighlty gritty feel. The image for the magazine cover was different from my "Dead Reckoning" poster as it was taken with a location especially in mind, in this case a graveyard - more specifically in front of a gravestone. This was to really to connote that the dead were rising and that this movie will be about the undead and tie into the current success of zombie films such as "The Undead" and TV series like "Dead Set".

A similar cover, although for an entirely different genre, from "Empire" magazine (picture below) has several aspects similar to mine - in terms of a dark, grungy feel to it, as well as the compasition of the image used. With the blood and the lighting effects used in order to darken the atmosphere of the cover.

I edited the image on the magazine cover in order to add dark red blood stains to the stone, this was really to enforce the connotation of evil and death into the audience - as well as to connote that the film will be gory to some extent.

In order to link the styles of all three of my texts, I had to really think about my target audience and other auteurs that had found success. Considering I took a lot of influences from George A. Romero and his type of horrors,and aimed a hardcore –yet mainstream (witness the success of "Shaun of the Dead"). This helped decide that my magazine cover would be using "Empire", as it'd reach a lot of my target audience of teenage horror fans.