Evaluation Question 2 - Rebecca

2. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
When developing the various different areas of our products, we needed to ensure that they all linked together, to complete a professional looking promotional package for our teaser trailer, poster and website.


Colour Scheme

First of all, we ensured that the colour scheme of all our work fitted together well. During our research and planning stage, we noticed that one of the conventions of a psychological horror, was to have a fairly dark colour palette.

Colour Deconstruction
"The saturation isn't very high, and there isn't a great contrast either, however the brightness is still high enough so that the viewer can see all the features of the character's face. The lower saturation immediately gives quite a dark feel to the shot, by no means is this a happy experience, and the feelings of sadness, depression and pain could be portrayed through these colours. I think this is definitely a technique to consider when editing the final montage shots for our trailer, and to make a distinction between real life and our protagonist's imaginary friend"

"We immediately get a sense of dark foreboding atmosphere from this shot, and most of it is portrayed through the colours - this could be used as a build up in our trailer. The low saturation makes the scene quite dreary, however the contrast is very high in this shot, making the black and white stand out, and helps draw the audience's attention to the dominant parts of the scene. The colour temperature is also very low, and we can see this and the lack of saturation by looking at the washed out red door on the right hand side of the frame. The high contrast also makes some parts of the frame, especially the background appear in very dark shadows, creating a sense of danger and mystery in the shot"


Implementation
For this, throughout our teaser trailer, we edited the colours of several shots to make them appear darker, as well as shooting in dark locations, such as a loft, for the end scene where we witness the after effects of the kidnap. We then wanted to combine these dark colours with the images used on both our poster and website. For our poster, we decided to use a photo taken in the loft of the protagonist and her imaginary friend, as this suggests isolation and danger to the audience. We also like how this links to one of the most important scenes of our teaser trailer. For our website, we used a different image as the background, as wanted variety, however, so that our products link together, we used the same idea of our poster, and included both the protagonist and her imaginary friend in the same image. We also made the edges of the image very dark, to bring in the use of a darker colour scheme, showing conforming to the conventions of psychological horror.

Tag line

To ensure that the combination of our main product and ancillary texts is effective, we also had to ensure that the tag line was the same throughout all our products. We decided that we would not use our tag line in our actual teaser trailer, because we already had a sufficient number of titles throughout the trailer, and didn't think it would be appropriate to overwhelm our audience with text throughout the trailer. Therefore we needed to ensure that the tag line for both our website and poster was the same. This was simple enough, but we decided instead of having the tag line all on one line, we would split it, to make it more interesting for our audience. You can see how the tag line looked on the website before splitting here, and what it looks like after splitting here. We also split the tag line up on our poster, as we had slightly restricted room on the poster, so this was another benefit of having the tag line spread across several lines. You can see how the tag line appears here. This makes the combination of our products effective, because the audience will see a similar layout whenever they see our poster or visit our website, and this familiar layout will help them to remember our film, and want to watch the teaser trailer.

Typography

Throughout all three of our media products, it was really important to incorporate the same typography into each, so that they all look the same and you can tell they are part of the same promotional package. For this, we created our typography in Photoshop, and decided that we would have a font for our titles in the teaser trailer, an edited font for our title and tag line typography, and another very simplistic font for the rest of the website.

Here you can see how we went from a drawing to a basic design of possible typography, using the online service Pixlr Editor. This was good for playing with ideas, as it was easier to use than Photoshop and allowed us to practice with different typography manipulation before deciding on our final idea.

There was a while during the development of our typography where we played with the idea of using a inky looking typography, because we thought this would fit in well with our narrative and hint at the idea of kidnap. You can see here how we experimented with this idea. However, we wanted to make it look really professional, and this trial didn't meet our expectations, so we moved on and created this, which is much more uniform and fits better with the conventions found in typography of products also in the psychological thriller genre.

For our teaser trailer, we used the same font, 'Dark Ages' for all our titles, we felt that this fitted with the narrative of our teaser trailer, and it also fitted well with the font 'Old Style', which we used to make the tag line with. We also felt that the tag line and title had to be different, as we noticed this was a common convention of film trailers and posters. There were many stages during the development of our typography, as we encountered quite a few problems along the way.

Combining our three products

When comparing our three products, we wanted to make sure that there was consistency with how we had laid out various parts of them, such as the typography. This was the main thing we had to focus on when checking that the combination was effective, so we decided to utilise the space on the right of the poster and the website to place the title of our teaser trailer. This meant we could use the same positioning of all the letters, and our audience would be able to quickly identify that the website and poster were for the same film.