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

1. How Effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts? Evaluation Question 2

2. Importance of marketing films Marketing films is a key part of the film industry. If a film is not promoted or advertised, then the audience will not know it is coming out and they will not go and watch the film. Distribution companies have the job of marketing the films and making the audiences want to go and watch it. Marketing is a key factor to the financial success of a film, and how much profit the film makes. Another key factor of marketing a film is making sure that you aim the marketing towards an audience that are interested in that particular type of film (target audience). You need to know your target audience, and that is done through researching the target audiences age, gender, lifestyle and social class. For example the upcoming ‘Shaun the sheep’ film will not be marketed in a magazine like Total Film.

3. Our film and trailer In our film we believe our USP was because the hero is an anti hero who is forced into action because the girl he loves is dying. We felt it was important to have a USP (Unique Selling Point) to help us market the film to a particular audience. The one thing we did with our trailer was that we left it on a cling hanger, which makes the audience want to come and watch the movie to find out what happens. We also feel it very clearly showed the genre of our film, which means that dystopian sci-fi fans can easily enjoy and find the trailer. To also make sure the film is easily seen as dystopian we clearly show that the protagonist is fed up in the world he lives in and is going to try and rebel, which is very common in dystopian movies. The tagline for our film is ‘Time is running out faster than ever before’. We felt this was appropriate for our film

4. Appealing to our target audience In our trailer there are many elements that may appeal to our target audience, for example, a big theme in our trailer is love and romance. This is because the main character is trying to save his wife, and this would appeal to females and couples. In the trailer there is a couple of shots based around this. There is also a lot of shots based on the run down city that the film is based in, and includes a high paced ending to the trailer as the main character looks to save his wife. This may appeal to the male audience. The trailer does not reveal too much, and this may make the target audience more likely to come and watch the film and find out what happens. There is also a lot of elements in our film that will appeal to our target audience. One element in particular is the poor against the rich, this would appeal to the status of people we are targeting which is working class. There is a constant battle between the wealthy government who can live forever and the poor civilians whose lives are cut short.

5. Target audience Our target audience is mainly male because we believe that the dystopian sci-fi genre, is more watched by males. However, females may also be interested in our movie because the basis of the story is around love, and how the main character is trying to save his wife. This also means that it could be a suitable movie for couples to go and watch together. The age range of male audiences we are aiming our film towards is 15-40, as we believe it is not suitable for people under 15 because of the 15 age certificate, and it may not be as appealing to people over the age of 40. Our main character is 25 so it also means that both the target audience can relate, the younger target audience may look up to the character and the older target audience may remember when they were that age. The status of our audience we thought we would target would be working class, as our film has a running theme of the poor against the rich which we felt a working class citizen may understand and be able to relate to. Additionally, the film is about the government being overthrown, and that the government control everything, which is very prominent right now

6. Target audience research

7. Classification We decided that our film would be certified as a 15. This is because it allows us to target a much wider target audience. But also because there will be scenes in the movie that may not be suitable for a younger audience because they may contain strong violence, strong language, discriminatory language or behaviour and a chance of sexual activity. We also believe an 18 certificate gets rid of a lot of our target audience, and would be harder to market our film.

8. Attracting a wider audience We thought we would attract a wide audience for our film through our trailer, ancillary products and our viral marketing campaign. Each of these are vitally important. With our trailer, we thought we would make it quite a generic trailer with classic conventions to draw a lot of people in. For example the build up of pace in the trailer adds a bit of action into the trailer, and the fact it is left on a sort of cliffhanger which will intrigue the people watching to watch the film. Additionally, our viral marketing campaign is a huge way to attract a lot of people because there is loads of ways to advertise to millions of people. Furthermore, we decided to release our film in the summer of 2015, in August. We did this as we thought we would attract a lot of cinema lovers who are no longer at school or college.

9. Our poster This is our film poster, we are using this poster to promote our film. Furthermore we thought that it would help us attract a wider audience because we would be able to place the poster at bus stops, shopping centres and supermarkets.This is because our film is aimed at the working class, and this is places they may be. Our main image shows a picture of the main character, but with his identity mainly hidden, which makes the audience want to know more about the character. There is also a blue tint to the image, which backs up the idea that it is a dystopian film, because it is not a natural colour of the world. In the background you can also see a run down, derelict building. This shows that the world is falling apart around him, and shows the world that the main character lives in. Another key part to our poster is our tagline ‘Time is running out faster than ever before’. This is key because it entices the audience, because it is intriguing, and again makes the audience want to know more. We decided to put the 5 stars on our poster from the magazine empire because it shows the audience that it has been reviewed as a very good film, and this makes them believe that it is worth their time to go and watch the film and spend their money on seeing it. We thought it was best to make the poster so that it didn't reveal too much and the audience wanted to know more. We also wanted to make sure that the colours were simple, and clear because we didn't want too much going on in the poster. I believe that we did this effectively.

10. Our Magazine Cover This is our magazine cover. ‘Empire’ was our magazine of choice because the people that read it are movie and cinema lovers who are looking for the next mainstream movie to watch, and it also regularly has dystopian on the front cover, which means our dystopian sci-fi would fit in very well on the front cover. We chose Empire because it mainly includes mainstream films, and that is what our film is intended to be. The image on the magazine cover is different from our trailer because we felt it was important to focus more on the character. From the camera angle, it makes the main character look heroic, but it is also visible from his clothes that he is a normal guy. This could appeal to the male audience, as it could relate to them, and make them feel heroic. However, the grey sky, and general broken down area round the main character also reiterates the fact that he is not in a nice place, and is in more of a dystopian world, where things are falling apart. We used a bold font, brighter colours, to contrast with our broken down world, and dystopian theme. We also felt that bold writing, would make the magazine stand out on the shelves more and make people pick it up and read it. Also, we felt that if their was an online version of this magazine, it could attract to an even wider audience, of people that dont buy the magazine, and only look at it online.

11. Film promotion and marketing We want to use social media as part of our viral marketing campaign because it is a great way to access millions of people for free. With the likes of Twitter and Facebook we can access a lot of people and start to become interactive with the fans as the build up of the movie intensifies. We would post pictures of behind the scenes action, interviews and chat shows. We feel if we use social media to our benefit we can gain a much bigger audience. We are hoping that all our promotional products will work together to help promote our film. We want to use our trailer as the basis of our marketing plan and we’re hoping that it will attract a large amount of our audience. We then want our posters to be all around the country, in bus stops, supermarkets and shopping centers to get people interested and get them to watch our trailer. We then want to use the magazine to attract some of the audience and hopefully with word of mouth it will be bought by many people. Then we want to use viral marketing to continue to market our product and use social media sites to continuously update people on how the film is progressing.