How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary

texts?When creating our poster we decided to maintain the level of mystery that is present throughout our production. We saw in our research that in thriller movies it wasn’t a common practice to have a minimalistic poster, however the poster for Shutter Island which influenced our decisions seemed to find a middle ground between showing little detail relating to the plot, allowing for it to remain a mystery to the viewers who are take an interest, while still allowing room for how we create the mystery. Unlike the Sixth Sense poster which had little else apart from the two main characters and a title, we’ve already presented the audience with a detail to help interest them; the two identical characters facing Lucy. This creates the sense of mystery which we were looking for without merely stating what exactly is going on in the piece.It also helps that a majority of films have at least a poster to advertise itself.If we had the option to create a trailer for the short film, it would most likely have still been a better idea to choose just a poster as for a low budget short film it is unlikely that a trailer would actually be a profitable investment for an indie film maker.

Creating a review for our film was an effective use of an ancillary text as it allowed for us to take a look back over our production and find out what could have been done better. Although this process is normally done from the view of an outside party, allowing for an unbiased view of the text in question, by looking at our own short film we were able to go through the areas which we felt were weaker than others and discuss what went wrong. Although this is not present in the final review it was an effective side effect of reviewing our own piece.

It is unusual for a 5 minute short film to get a review, and often film magazines give half hour short films comparatively tiny reviews. It is common however for multiple reviews to be sorted onto one page and so them being short is understandable, however something else we noticed was that the reviews were also sorted based on how good or bad they were. This wasn’t merely in the fashion where good films are listed in a good film section, but instead those which rate lower are crammed in the bottom half of a page, often two filling the same space. We attempted to emulate both this layout style as well as some of the house style used by some review magazines, outlining part of the detail box as well as putting the overall verdict in a different coloured box as to ensure that it stands out from the background.

By doing a review to go with our short film we were allowed to have a better look at he contents of a review as well as what other short film makers had created while also seeing where those reviewing had asked for improvements. This ancillary text has given us a better insight into what is expected from a short film maker through the research surrounding it as well as allowing for us to look back at what we had created and ask ourselves if we were truly happy with the final product

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