Q2. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

              Overall, I am happy with what how my main and ancillary tasks have turned out, I feel they work successfully to follow the conventions of Film Noir and create interest for the audience in the story and in the professionalism of the outcome. The archetypal characters are developed well in the narrative and hinted to in the poster and review page. I feel the poster images especially help to give the potential audience a taster for the themes of the Noir genre as well as the specific themes of the film. The toning of the film and ancillary tasks is more suggestive of a niche genre and help to attract the right kind of audience (the target audience). Cigarette smoking and themes of crime and romance also help to bring the production closer still to the codes of the genre as do the poster and review page.

                Our organised planning processes’ helped to keep our discussions productive and were key to producing a narrative which we hope is interesting and easy to understand. Singularly, regarding my ancillary tasks, I feel I made the correct decisions and managed to capture the feel of the film well enough to encourage the potential audience members to watch it.

THE POSTER:

            I was certain that I really wanted to use a shot from one of the two photo shoots we’d done but found through audience research but also due to my own preference, that the poster looked too contrived with one of these shots. I decided to use a shot actually taken on set to use in my poster as this looked a lot more real and gave more of a sense of what the film is actually like. I made some mock up posters with the photo shoot images to compare the two uses of images and check that what I had chosen was the right thing to choose.

            The next decision I had to make was the font type, I tried out various fonts such as ‘courier new’, and elephant. I decided that ‘courier new’ looked too cliché so went with ‘elephant’ but even found that to be not quite what I wanted so managed to lengthen it vertically using photoshop. The positioning of the text came naturally really as I just tried to fit it around the key focus’ so as not to distract from them. I think having it positioned centrally helped to keep the poster simple and clear to potential audience members.

THE REVIEW PAGE:

            The review page required more decision making. The actual written review turned out to be one of the easiest aspects of the review; I tried out a fair few designs before finding something which I felt looked professional enough. The placement of everything and even the colour scheme became difficult to decide. I knew I didn’t want to have a layout totally reflecting the style of the film because reviews are usually written independently from the film and so a style reflecting the film would be unnecessary.

            Taking inspiration from sources such as The Verge and Empire I managed to find a layout I was happy with. I didn’t want to create the review for an existing magazine as I wanted to create something original, not just something almost copied (in style) from an existing review. I liked the modern, graphic sort of feel to The Verge but liked the text layout and caption style of empire magazine so ended up taking a bit from both with screen shots from the film making sure the themes of the short were captured.

LINKS TO THE MAIN TASK:

            I feel that the poster reflects the essence of the Neo-noir genre due to the image used, its alternative colour scheme and the central layout. It follows the key conventions of film posters with the credits positioned centrally and towards the bottom, and the highest paid Actor’s name positioned in the top left hand corner. The pale colour scheme, I think, is what distinguishes it as a poster for an alternative/ indie film. As for the review, I feel it captures the core of the film through the screenshots and also would work as an advertisement if it were to be published due to the nature in which it is written. Again, it follows the conventions of review pages well with the star rating, photo captions and subheadings. Overall, I think it looks very professional and works well to create a good image of the film.