How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
From my previous research into Jennifer’s Body and the cross media campaign behind it, it gave me a solid understanding in how to use subtle similarities throughout each type of media to allow recognition in the product and how if done effectively enough the accidental audience will recognise it too. Through my research I found that by marketing the main character (Megan Fox) she becomes associated with the film and even though her character is portrayed in juxtaposed scenerios the audience are still able to recognise the film. When they used the film on the front cover of Fangoria magazine they did not need the same or similar image as that from the film poster because people were already aware of her status alongside the film. This gave me a good understanding of the impact of cross media and how it works. The audience are able to recognise the product due to the similarites across the different areas of media they are advertised in. With this knowledge we decided the technique was to ensure the tagline and film title remained the same in each product and we used the same title font for both the film poster and magazine front cover. However we found that against our teaser trailer the distorted font did not work as effectively so chose a similar font that stood out instead.
(below is the link back to my post on cross media campaigns and Jennifers body as the example):
We choose a font that was bold but slightly edgy and fits in with the genre; there was no point in using creative or décor typography because that is not a convention of a social realist drama. From analysing the film poster for ‘Adulthood’ and ‘4,3,2,1’ we discovered that we didn’t need fancy font to catch the audience’s attention but that it was more important for our film title to stand out and attract attention just as much as the image needed to. Here is an example of previous film titles all of which follow similar font types yet are all recognisable to the audience. Adulthood and 1 Day both use their taglines as an essential to the promotion of the film which is what we also chose to do, however Adulthood used theirs in a different way to us by using it as a link to the previous sequel.
We followed the codes of the fonts for each of these film titles and as you can see from the screenshots above the placement and large, bold font creates an impact rather than disappearing behind the image. Especially for '4,3,2,1' the image works around the title and this is also the case for Adulthood were the title is placed above the characters. Here we have chosen to place the title further towards the bottom and in the centre between the characters, this was also used as a way to create distance between our main character and our muggers in the background.
We chose to use the same tagline in each product "£10,000, 1 WEEK" unlike Jennifer's Body who used the tagline 'She's evil..and not just high school evil' for the film poster whereas Fangoria played around with the actresses real name 'Megan Fox will eat you alive!' this challenged the conventions of the purpose of a tagline across cross media campaign but was still used as a promotional tool. I think by choosing to stick with the same tagline across all three products it prevented confusion and worked as an effective promotional tool.
Another convention we considered was the mise en scene and representation of the characters across each advertisement. We had to ensure that each character especially the main character was presented in the same way every time. When we came to shoot and produce our magazine front cover we were going to use the same image of the main character but in a mid shot, however when we looked back at our contact sheets we decided the image with the gun had a much harder and lasting effect. This was a risk we decided to take but from the feedback we got it seems to have worked. We didn't want to change the perception of our character but to just exagerate his character slightly by using a more aggressive and intimidating image similar to that used on Empire for the Iron Man issue. It also gave us a border around Steon so that we could include a lot of text. This image shows continuity from the film poster and teaser because of the recognition that this character has with the film.
http://gracereohorn.blogspot.com/2010/09/film-magazines.html
http://gracereohorn.blogspot.com/2010/09/film-magazines.html
Overall I think our use of cross media has worked effectively, it is clear from the teaser trailer, the magazine front cover and the film poster who our main character is and the genre of our film. I have learnt that cross media although a more expensive option it is effective, the whole concept of advertising is selling your product and to do this the audience need to be aware of what you are selling, its purpose and what they can get out of it. This in the film industry is the entertainment, excitement or thrill they may get out of the film. By having a USP (unique selling point) such as a famous or well known actress/actor like Megan Fox in Jennifer's Body creates its own promotion. We tried to recreate this with a smilar scenerio on the front cover of our magazine, we used interviews and double page spreads of the main character as a promotional tool and selling point. Interviews with Noel Clarke and persuasive language sucj as 'exclusive' and 'latest' are appealing to the audience, we also chose to use articles that covered other storylines and recent films that may not be under social realist drama but similar genres.
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