How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary

task?

By Laura Mandeville and Kelly Ann Shanahan

The key importance in our project was producing an effective horror film trailer, however along with this we had to produce an accompanying film poster and magazine front cover. Since when creating an horror film a poster and magazine front cover are just as significant, as they are just another way of persuading the audience into going to watch the film.

As we felt the trailer was the key factor out of the three tasks, thereforewe decided to link the poster and magazine front cover back to this. Firstly our poster included a central image of the little girl who features in the film’s trailer. We used an image that was extremely unfocused this meant that the little girls face was very hard to make out, which is something that we intentionally did as we did not what to give what the looked like away in the poster, as we thought it added to the mystery. This is an idea that we got from analysing ’30 Days of Night’ since in there poster the audience are unable to make out what the vampire looks like, in addition to this we continued this in our film as we only showed the little girl for quick snap shots.

We came to the decision to use the little girl in our poster, as we felt that she definitely brought a creepy and disturbing feel to the poster and would hopefully make the audience want to go and see the film. Since people go to watch horror films to be scared and this poster should show them that this film is going to be chilling and scary. When it came to our magazine front cover we decided to use the young girl ‘Elizabeth’, as she is the main character in the film and we felt that a good way to entice the audience to come and see the film would be to show her looking vulnerable and innocent and therefore make the audience want to know what happens to her in the film.

One way in which we linked the film trailer to the front cover was by having the mystery hand on the girl’s shoulder this relates to the trailer as in the trailer we see a pair of footsteps. Therefore we thought the mystery hand would be good as it should make the audience want to know who this mystery character is creating an enigma.

We added a filter to poster to, as the filter on the poster darkened the image, we did this as we wanted to create an eerie feel and darken the atmosphere of the overall film.