Evaluation 3: How alike film posters and magazines are your ancillary texts?

The ancillary texts that our group created of a magazine cover and a film poster, which display our horror trailer, our group brainstormed on ideas on what would most effectively establish our films genre. Therefore we took to the internet to try and gain inspiration from various film posters and magazine covers. For our magazine cover we mainly viewed empire covers, which is branded one of the highest redeemed film magazines in the industry therefore we thought that. taking inspiration from a highly regarded magazine, it would give our cover a more professional image.

The magazine cover that we chose to take inspiration from was the jokers in 2015, where we saw Jared Leto with his interpretation as the new villain, we believed that seeing the villain dominating the cover standing up and appearing confrontational, accurately intimidates the audience and sets the powerful and dominating characteristics of the villain. That is why with our film's magazine cover,  we also set our villain standing up, in a creepy location alone, showing the clown looking directly down the camera, as if he is staring right into the audiences eyes, again intimidating the receiving audience, accurately portraying the films genre as horror. We didn't use a particular editing tool of software when creating our cover, therefore it was created based on the photograph we had taken of our clown, which would be the base of the entire surface of the magazine's cover.

We simply added text and imagery over the top of the main background. With this the group decided that we wanted to promote the film effectively, by placing our film's title body at the centre of the cover underneath the majority of the clown. The magazine's clout scheme was black and white, but displayed only one tone of colour, this being the red of the blood on our film's title, again showing the tension of violence and blood, This also attracts the consumers to be attracted to this colour on the magazine, as due to the simple tones of black and white on the rest of the magazine, it is instinct for the reader to have their eyes drawn to the only part of colour on the screen, and with this being our film title, the most important part of the magazine for the audience to take from, so that they can go to the cinema and watch the film and buy spread the word to their friends and family about the production. We also thought to give a more professional look magazine promotions are an often tactic on how to get consumers to buy the magazine, with us this was done through the bold blue logo on the front which states that inside a free movie poster of the film is available, which again we believed gave a professional look to our production.

Our group especially liked the film poster for the 2001 horror flick "Hannibal", which displayed an extremely disturbing image set on a dimly lit background, with a sinister face displaying inhumane like qualities, showing deep, blood red eyes, while showing a sinister smirk, making the audience immediately feel uncomfortable and sense the horror genre effectively. Therefore due to our antagonist being the sole element of horror to our  trailer, we needed to involve our clown heavily within our poster, with this in mind we decided to also show a dark background, with half of our antagonists face edging out of the left. half of the poster, but in black and white only displaying one colour within our poster, red. This created the atmosphere of violence and blood, creating the correct tone for our audience to take to base on what our films genre and style will be like.

We thought that a poster that was less dramatic and filled, would be more of a statement, Therefore with this technique of showing limited text and visuals, this shows the seriousness of the film and that it a disturbing and paranormal style of horror. The text that we did involve within our poster was simple, we involved the main characters within the film along the top of the poster above the clown, the font we chose was  an old fashioned digitalised font, showing hints towards the time that it is made and how technology could be involved within the films plot and also the font itself shows an eerily creepy effect. Then another piece of text we had on the poster was our vertically placed film title in bold large white writing, also again showing the red balloon, to show the tones of unsettling violent themes. We placed the same digitalised font underneath this with a cute from the film which states "whats the matter? you look as if you've seen a clown", Which takes its origins from the infamous saying " you look like you've been a ghost", which we wanted to spin into our own as if our antagonist had said it himself and shows an opinion that after watching this film, you will believe no matter what that coins are scarier than ghosts.