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

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

The ancillary tasks poster and website combined with the main product teaser trailer help to form brand recognition throughout our work, this will help with promotion of the film to draw in a selected audience. We decided to use our villain to help create the brand recognition; films such as Saw and The Texas chainsaw massacre used their murderer to help create brand recognition.                                   

By using a masked murderer as the main villain this follows the set codes and conventions of slasher horror films.  The poster for Saw 3 focuses mainly on the costuming of the villain concealing his personal identity whilst exposing the crazed nature of his character through the choice of mask. We followed this convention by using the mask of our villain as the iconic feature; our poster focuses on this to emphasise the impassive features of the gas mask which represents the former shell of the villain after the experience of war has removed all emotion.  We designed various posters and chose the one which was the most effective. When creating the posters we used the gas mask as the main feature. we designed a poster with an explosion as the main image to draw in a selected audience which portrays the war scenes shown at the start of our teaser trailer but we decided to use a more simple design which would focus on one aspect of the film rather than making the poster appear overcrowded and give too much of the plot away.

By using a poster to advertise our film this presentational device could be seen virtually anywhere from magazines to bill boards which is vital when advertising as this can reach a vast audience. By adding the website address, located at the bottom of the poster, this would appeal to the vast online society more specifically at our target audience aged between 15-22. Our final design focuses on the blunt features of the gasmask made ominous with the use of the red lighting.

Although our iconic feature is the gasmask this wasn’t shown on our home page on our website, the design again was kept simple and having the Title appear on the home screen gave a heightened sense of isolation conforming to the conventions of a slasher film. We wanted the typeface for the title to conform to our theme of warfare and the military division which is where the tagline arrives from. The typeface is used throughout our ancillary tasks and our main media product helping to form a recognisable house style amongst the products. The colour red is used frequently throughout both of the ancillary tasks which is a feature that follows the conventions of horror films which was found whilst researching various other websites such as

The Crazies, another characteristic which we used that follows the codes and conventions of slasher films throughout our media tasks was the use of low profile lighting this is used in our main task to depict the darkness within the villain that is yet to be exposed.

1 In what way does your media product, develop or challenge forms of real media products?
3 What have you learned through audience feedback?
4 How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research and planning and evaluation stages?