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

Our Main Product was a horror teaser trailer with different aspects of conventions of the horror genre. Our ancillary tasks had to reflect this as best as possible to insure attracting the chosen target audience and promoting the film showing its genre and suggesting the plot.

Our website shows the location of the film which was one our main hooks of the film as it is an old abandoned hospital which links to the title ‘Patient 13’ using this simple yet effect shot of the hospital in black and white, gives the audience an instant assumption of the building being the main scene of the horror and that it is home to the killer. Once the website has loaded, the trailer starts immediately, this allows the user to refresh their memory of the film and link it with the hospital. The tabs at the top of the page allow the user to widen their knowledge of the film which will encourage the user to want to view the entire film more. The font used on the website is the same font used in the trailer for the tag lines. This creates branding for the film which enables this creates a familiar tag that the audience can recognise throughout advertising and promoting. The tag line can be associated with the movie as the words are similar to each other forming a connection. The colours of the website fit closely with the trailer as they keep to the convention of the horror colours, black white and red. The black and white background emphasises the red title drawing the attention of the viewer to it as well as the white writing. This is the same in our teaser trailer as we only use red and white writing. This is because the lighting of torches and natural lighting caused the predominant colour in the shots to be black, therefore using red and white writing, not only gives the connotation of blood but also makes the tag lines clear and more striking.

Although the image on the poster is different from the website, there are still obvious likenesses linking the two ancillary tasks and the teaser trailer. We have used the same font throughout branding the film and also the tag line we used is the same on the poster as it is on the website. On the poster we used the image of the villain with his back to the wall, this is effective and links to the trailer as the villains face is never revealed apart from with a mask on. This keeps the mystery in the trailer of who the villain is, therefore enticing the audience to watch the film. The villain takes up most of the poster, which demonstrates his dominance in the trailer. The mise en scene of the poster is small but effective, as it give a reminder of the location the film was set in and that it is isolated by abandonment. 

Theories

We looked at different theories when creating our teaser trailer as it was important to conform to some and subvert others. These are a few theories that we looked at.


Levi-Strauss Binary Opposition that tension is based on opposition or conflict e.g. good and evil. This was a main influence for us as our film is the question of sanity and in the trailer it shows conflict between the villain 'Patient 13' who is clearly insane and the young boys who break into the house, who are sane. We displayed the chase and struggle between the two sides to build the tension in the trailer, therefore conforming to the theory.


Barthes Enigma Code the theory that a film establishes mysteries as it goes on and makes the audience ask questions. This was a very important one for us to look at as we wanted the audience to ask themselves questions about our film and to involve mysteries, however we needed to distort the answers to ensure that their interest was held.


Todorov's Theory this is that all films start with an equilibrium which then is suddenly taken to a disequilibrium and then finally the conflict is resolved and the film ends with equilibrium again. Our trailer however is different from this theory as it ends in disequilibrium. This is the case with most horror teaser trailers as the ending would be given away if the conflict were to be resolved, it also keeps the audience on the edge as there is no visible solution showing, which is a convention of a good teaser trailer.


Aristotle's Unities is that a story/film should all take place in the same time moving toward a logical ending. We however subverted this theory as, because of our quick editing of shots out of chronological order, the audience would not be able to find a logical ending as it was not shown and the plot was hazed.