How Effective Is The Combination Of Your Main Product And Ancillary Texts?
My Teaser trailer is targeted for a Teenage audience and has a Rating of 15. I visited websites such as www.watch-movies.net, where I analysed slasher horrors. I found that audience aged 15-24 rated some of the films more than 7 stars out of 10. As those who rated fell under our target audience category I related this to our film. This made us more aware of the amount of people that watch and enjoy slasher horrors. I did not think that our film had a secondary audience such as an older audience; this is not conclusive due to our feedback films, which featured two older men, one who would enjoy the film and one who wouldn’t!
The marketing campaign that I created was successful as I used a number of promotional tools that can easily be accessed nationally and globally by my specific teen target audience. The teaser trailer was posted on Youtube and in a Facebook group allowing audiences were allowed to join; become members of the fan group and view the trailer. Additionally it allows fans to see pictures of the poster and shots taken whilst filming of the setting and killer and view the actual trailer whilst at the same time invite other friends to do the same. The two social networking sites I used are both easily accessible and used by millions of teens across the globe. My objective for the teaser trailer was to create word of mouth via these social networking sites as this phenomenon of word-of-mouth has created much success for many films because social networking sites have never been more popular and people can talk about what they love freely and together can create a global campaign for something like a film.
The limited footage allows audiences to recognise the slasher horror genre without giving too much of the story away. I purposely didn't want to include the past story to why the killer became this way as it will encourage people to want to watch the film. This created hype around the teaser, causing audiences to discuss its content and encouraging them to find out more information online, using the public Facebook group and Youtube. This made it easier for me to gain an established audience so that when the poster and magazine was published, they were more confident to give both positive and negative feedback. Films such as ‘The Dark Night’ have successfully portrayed stunts of viral marketing as the slogan ‘Why so serious?’ became one of the best known slogan of all time and resulted in the film earning the most in box office revenues in 2008.
Posters in any film campaign are of great importance because they have to try and capture in a still image the promise of the moving images that you will see at the cinema. The poster for a film has to tell you as much information about a film as it can with one look at it, but because the poster that I created was a teaser poster, I wanted it to portray something sinister and different to what you normally encounter in everyday society whilst at the same time not revealing too much and leaving you to want to know more about what you have just seen.
Our film magazine and poster appeals to the right genre as it offers conventions the audience is expecting to be seen. The poster will appeal to the horror movie fans including our target audience as the mis-en-scene is shown through and is easily identifiable. Our target audience may also want to see the film as it relates to them due to the age of the boy killer and the virtual reality world he is emerged in. The Gaming world and paraphernalia is so easily recognized and familiar to the younger generation, the computer font instantly allows the audience to relate to the film.
The magazine as an ancillary product concentrates a lot on the killer and his personality. I took a picture of a long shot of 'Dylan' (the antagonist) in a dark and scary lift with a gate door which he closely stood by; this links back to the film as it looks like a possible prime location of where he could have committed one of his murders. The genre (slasher horror) is shown through our media products, as the images used are dark, as well as the title of the film in red signifying blood.
In terms of the title of the film, Many conventional slasher horror titles relate back to the past story of the killer and are most commonly named after an occasion. Examples of this include 'Friday the 13th', 'Halloween' and 'My Bloody Valentine'. However, “Game Over” was directly related to the nature of the virtual world the killer was obsessed with, it is a familiar tag line for most computer games when you have died or failed in a task, It also is a descriptive term for death. Although I wanted to make the genre of the film clear, I felt like I didn't have to follow conventional slasher horror titles and have anything too descriptive in the title, as in the trailer. It was important to maintain a more abstract approach to the creation of the teaser trailer keeping the nature of the film ambiguous. I made the genre of the film clear in our viral campaign and through synergy, but although the images used are suggestive of a slasher , they are also very dark and anonymous, you never see the killers face or details of the plot.
There was limited narrative and use of footage in the trailer. This was not necessarily what I initially wanted to do but it worked as when I looked into our research, I found that trailers such as Toy Story and Star Trek that thought less about providing a story, concentrated on introducing the characters and setting the mood of the feature film. I wanted to follow the way they have done this in just giving the audience an insight into the personality of the boy who becomes a disturbed killer obsessed with computer games...
