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

For our ancillary tasks we have produced a full DVD cover (front and back) to go with our ‘film’ that we have created the trailer for as the main task. Also we created a poster to advertise the film. All three products are visually linked showing the main character, Hannah Gaskell, in them. With the poster, we took inspiration from two existing horror films. Firstly was ‘mirrors’ and also ‘one missed call’.

The reason for this decision is that they both use black backgrounds with a simple but effective single picture of what clearly features in the film they are advertising. However one thing we changed was the expression of the character in our image. We featured Hannah not looking in any danger, like the ‘mirrors’ poster does and not as an obvious enemy like the poster for ‘one missed call’ seems to be. This image featured on the front of both DVD cover and poster as we felt this to be more effective as people looking at this poster will immediately engage with Hannah and wonder what this film is really about.

Another way we decided to combine all three products is with the font we used. We wanted a font that people possibly may never have seen before but one that they can easily read and looks slightly different to standard text like times new roman. We went on the website www.dafont.com and found a good font called ‘I still know’.

We used this for all the main visual text that people will see, for example the name of our film on the DVD cover. With our DVD cover we decided to stick to the same theme of dark but simple for the front cover, similar to our poster, and for the back chose an existing film ‘the decent’ as inspiration and used that as a template.

I think it was an important decision to stick to conventional presentation of a DVD cover but turn it into our own unique product.

Overall we think the combination of our main product and ancillary texts work really well, sticking to a dark mysterious theme throughout, where the colour black is prominent and represents our theme of horror as this is the colour typically chosen for this genre. The fact that our main character prominently runs through each product will catch people’s attention making them interested in this person. This is why I feel we have produced a very effective combination of main product with ancillary texts.

H&M