Total Film, Sherlock Holmes

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First Storyboard Draft

Final Storyboard

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

The film distributor is the person releasing the films publicly, as well as creating posters, trailers and magazine advertisements in order to target its largest possible audience. Film distribution is the process in which the film goes through in order to make it watchable for its audience, for example being released on DVD or at the cinema. These two factors of distribution are key points in order to get a film noticed.


Advertising and promotional techniques are used in order to entice the audience and ultimately sell the film, advertising of the film can be done through many synergies, such as, billboards, trailers, the internet, cinema, magazines, word of mouth, radio and many more. All these being things that people interact with in their everyday lives, therefore targetting various audiences.

Advertising techniques have to be consistent in order to be memorable, when making and producing all these different promotions there has to be something memorable which will catch the audiences eye every time so that they know what product is being advertised. For example in the James Bond films they now don't even have to write the title and often just have the '007' logo because this has become an recognisable advertising technique within itself. We have also tried to use this technique within our film and our memorable logo is our film title Alice, which is featured on all advertising techniques and promotions.

Marketing can differ depending on the target audience for the chosen media product, for example films that target young adults and teenagers such as Twilight and Harry Potter would often find that audiences would be more effected by advertising such as word of mouth, trailers and social networking sites. Things such as word of mouth and talk about new films on social networking sites like Facebook are more likely to encourage young people to want to watch the film, as teenagers will normally like what their friends like or sometimes just follow the trend.

Audience research is a huge value to distribution companies when it comes to developing their campaigns, this is because distributors are able to clearly distinguish what it is that their target audience are wanting. As we did when producing our teaser trailer, they will often conduct viewings or questionaires in which they will then recieve the audience feeback which then allows them to change and adapt certain features which majority of audiences have picked up on.

Examples of how advertising varies -





Gnomeo & Juliet is an animated family film, mainly targetting young children. The colour scheme is bright and vibrant with childlike characters which attracts and plays to its audience. The film is loosely based on Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet which is recognised as the pun in the title.
















Due date is an American comedy road film targetting young adults. The colour scheme is normal lighting, which suggests a conventional 'normal' day. The genre of the film is easily recognised by Zach Galifianakis facial expression and other props around him such as the dog he is holding and the cast on Robert Downey JR's arm.

The Notebook is a romantic film of a couple who fall in love during the early 1940's. The main picture clearly distinguish's the genre by the pose the actors are holding, the rain also connotes the whole 'kissing in the rain' sager associated with romance. I think the main target audience for this film, and most other romances, would be females and I believe that we are addressed by the connotations of love. 

Finally this last film poster is for The Final Destination which is a horror, targeting a young adult audience. The genre is shown through the low key lighting and dark colours used which are all associated with the genre specific convention. 

An advertising campaign is a series of advertisement messages which share a single idea which make up marketing communication and appear in different media synergies across a period of time. These sort of campaign's can be found throughout things such as, the internet, YouTube, Television, Social networking sites, radio and many more. All these things are attracting a target audience, in a different a unique way. For example 

http://www.bloody-disgusting.com 

'your number 1 source for horror' is a viral campaign aimed at young adults. The two main things I found would appeal to their audiences the most are: 

1. People can join the group on the social networking sites, Facebook, Twitter and MySpace which are very popular around young adults and teenagers.
2. They feature latest  reviews and coming soon films that teenagers would be very interested in.

I mainly found this website effective because of the language they use, this is the key thing in order to attract a teenage audience by talking to them as though you are talking to a friend. 

A unified identity is something that can stand alone and be recognisable as part of a film. For example as mentioned above the James Bond 007 logo is so significant as a recognisable brand and advertising technique that is it able to stand alone and audiences are able to link it with the James Bond Films. Another key feature which is highly recognisable throughout James Bond advertising is the theme music, when audiences hear this soundtrack they immediately know that a James Bond film is being advertised. 

My Marketing Campaign

The film classification we decided to go with for 'Alice' was 15, we choose this category as we felt it gave us a wider and larger scale audience in which to advertise to. We thought this classification would be appropriate as it give us a lot of things to work with without going over film regulations. A main concept to keep in mind was that our trailer features a little girl, therefore we felt that not a severely high level of horror would be put across.

Throughout advertising I have always featured the little girl as my main image, and the film title and logo 'ALICE'. This is because I believe the little girl is our USP within our trailer and is ultimately 'Alice'.  Between my poster and my trailer I think there are many relationships, for example -

• Consistent image of little girl
• Consistent image of film title
• Website
• Dark lighting
• Simple, easy to read texts and fonts
• Appropriate colour scheme
• An enigma - in our trailer I believe the enigma is the past story of the little girl, and in my poster i believe that she is well hidden by the darkness signifying that she is almost 'lost' in the darkness.

The value of getting on a front cover for a film magazine is massively huge for any film distributors as magazines are a highly sellable media source therefore are enabling the film to get noticed. My magazine cover is able to relate to my film poster and trailer in that it again features -

• The little girl
• Consistent colour scheme
• Film title

Teaser Trailers & The Main Theatrical Trailer.

Teaser Trailer

A teaser trailer is a short trailer used to advertise an upcoming film, usually released before the final film is even complete and can somtimes have clips of footage which don't actually go into the film. They are made to 'tease' and wet the audiences appetite into wanting to watch the full film.

• Montage of 'best bits' from the film
• The clips often don't give away the plot of the film
• They have a limited amount of dialogue 
• They have limited detail of the release date, such as 'coming soon' or 'October'
• They show limited amount of characters, possibly just the main character

The main theatrical trailer

The main trailer is often the longer trailer and main advertisement that is exhibited in a cinema prior to its release date.

• They show clips from the complete film
• They show all of the main characters
• They usually end on a cliffhanger giving off an enigma for the film
• They use dialogue to create the narrative
• They have full details of the release date

Below i have featured Sorority Row's teaser trailer and main theatrical trailer as an example.

How did you use new technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

These images above are all the software and equipment we used when making our teaser trailer and ancillary texts.

Web 2.0 is a term used to describe advanced technology and Internet technology. The advantages of using Web 2.0 for low budget film makers are that majority of the technology used is available free of charge, such as google, blogger and YouTube. Websites such as these enable us to distribute, research and promote our own media texts. Other advantages are that people are able to get actively involved in what they are creating and that the information required is easier and faster to get hold of, in all making the job less time consuming and less effort in which to achieve.

Photoshop -  This programme was used when making both of my ancillary texts. Photoshop enabled me to insert pictures and fonts so that i could edit and manipulate them by using various tools and effects. By having 'layers' this meant that I could easily manage my images in order to create both my poster and magazine cover.

Flickr - This programme was used when completing research for ancillary texts and also in my evaluation. When researching ancillary texts we found film posters and magazine covers in which we thought worked well under the horror genre, we then annotated these on Flickr so that we could clearly distinguish key points in that we wanted to take across when it came to completing our own. I also used Flickr when evaluating my work as I think Flickr is easy to use and shows the points being made clear and constructively, therefore would be a more creative way of evaluating.

Blogger - This is the programme which all our coursework is recorded on. It allows us to create a background image, which ultimately represents the genre of the blog, this is then constructed with 'posts' which is what different parts of our work is posted under. Blogger allows us to upload images and videos, insert text and also enables us to upload our Flickr images which in a click takes you across to the Flickr website so that annotations can be easily viewed. Blogger has been the most useful media used as it allows us to demonstrate our coursework, not only in a practical way but also creative, which then makes the work far more interesting to complete and to view.

IPhone - This is my phone, this was used in the making of our teaser trailer to contact other members in our group when needing to organise and plan our shooting schedules .

Mac Computer - These are the computers in which we created all our work on and used the Internet.

Final Cut Pro - Final Cut Pro is the programme we used to upload our footage from the video camera and import files. This is then what our teaser trailer was created on. Final Cut Pro enabled us to grab various shots from our footage which would then be cut down and edited to fit our needs. With a timeline style format it makes the footage and sound easy to address and therefore pick up if to edit and change. A lot of our editing was a 'try and see' process because at first the software package appeared complex, however with time we got used to it which made our trailer easier to do and ultimately better with better editing skills.


Garageband - Garageband is music composition software which we used to create original sounds and also to distort rights-free music and voices. It enabled us to create an effective sound track by adding reverb and mixing instruments. 

Video Camera - A video camera was used to film all our footage for our teaser trailer. We used props such as a tripod, this made our shots appear careful and still and also allowed us to do higher angle shots from a titled position. Majority of our filming was handheld as we felt this worked well with our horror genre and also fits in with the fact that our teaser trailer is a low budget British film which suggests that more technical equipment was not available to us. Another feature which we used was night mode, this is also genre specific to horror and gave it a scarier, darker feel.

Digital Camera - A digital camera was used when taking still images of our little girl which we used in our trailer, these images were used to make up our ancillary texts. The pictures were then either uploaded through a memory stick or sent through via email to our college address, therefore making the process less time consuming and easy.

My fonts.com - This is a distributor of digital fonts and is the website in which we created our main font and film title Alice.

YouTube -  YouTube was used for many important areas throughout our coursework for example, research, planning, evaluating and audience feedback. In research and planning we were able to embed a teaser trailer from YouTube in which we then analysed to help us gain knowledge of various horror's and to be used to the horror conventions. Both our draft and final teaser trailers were uploaded onto YouTube, firstly to put onto our blog, but also to gain audience feedback. As YouTube is a worldwide website it proved to be the best source of gaining audience feedback as people are able to rate, like and comment the trailer. This was also played through YouTube when having our class viewing of our trailers which was our main source of audience feedback, therefore proving to be an important aspect of our production.

Google -  Google is a worldwide search engine which proved useful in all aspects of making our trailer, poster and magazine cover. A few examples of what we used Google for are as follows - 

• Film posters
• Film magazines
• Researching horror
• Logo's and many more.

All these technologies have made it possible to develop my creativity, skills and also my knowledge. This has been achieved in that I am now more capable on various programmes such as Final Cut Pro and Photoshop, therefore more confident when attempting and completing work.

MagazineCover

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