Evaluation Question

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

When making our ancillary texts, we felt that we needed to maintain the same theme and style as in our film.  Our film is very slick, stylish and very original.  The colours, for instance, are very captivating.  Our poster and review page both needed to show the originality and quirkiness of the piece.  

Bokeh is the main feature within our film, and for our audience to understand, or be intrigued by our poster I needed to introduce the uniqueness of our film.  I selected both "untouched" bokeh (lights just blurred with no word/symbol) and two of our most eye-catching shapes (the stars and the people).  I chose the stars, because it is our brightest image, and will capture the audiences eye, and I chose the people because it is our most intriguing and thought-provoking image.  The main aim of the film is to intrigue people, and make them want to find out about the technique.  These particular images will certainly intrigue audience members to watch our film, and captivate them from the beginning.  

I used a dark grey background to introduce the surrounding dark area around the blurred lights.  Most of our shots are filmed at night, so I also wanted to introduce the way we present the bokeh lights in our film.  The grey background was also used to bring out the colours from the images further.  All the colours that are in the pictures are very appealing and attractive colours.  By contrasting them with a dark background they will become even more attractive.  

Although I was inspired by a current film poster (Martha Marcy May Marlene), I used the stencil of the title because it is like the lens covers we have been using.  Shown below...

I wanted to suggest to the audience how they could achieve this technique themselves through our poster image, a couple of shots within the film, i.e. the bicycle and the "wander" shots.  Because we did not invent this technique, and it has been done before, we felt that we wanted to make a film that used our own ideas, and at the same time promoted the almost unknown bokeh effect.  

What we wanted to maintain in our poster, we also wanted to promote in our review page.  When looking at the film magazine "Sight & Sound" we saw that the majority of the space filled was with text, and the lesser part of the space contained an image.  Most pages only have one image.  I chose to listen to the audience feedback and use the image of the blurred people as the image on our review page.  I wanted to link both my poster and review together, and this image was the most captivating image for our audience.  The image also links to our poster because of the vibrant colours used on a contrasting dark background.

When making our ancillary texts, we kept the same font as the title in our short film.  Most media companies, such as Apple, use the same font on all advertisements for their products.  This is a subliminal  reminder of the brand.  We decided to follow this principle, and make the title font our brand font.   It could be argued that we subconsciously chose this font because we are surrounded by Apple advertisements which target my age group.  We researched the font and discovered that "helvetica" has been used by Apple in promoting their iPod and iPhone products.  

"50% of iPhone users are under the age of 30, 15% are students. "  (Rubicon - Apple iPhone Successes and challenges for the mobile industry - focused on US users).  We share the same demographic as Apple, so using a similar font will guarantee visual interest from our audience.  

Using the same font maintains the same house-style throughout so that audiences would instantly associate the article and poster with the film through the same, recognisable font.  This promotes our products as a brand.  The images used are very quirky and rebellious in film techniques.  Because of this originality, our products promote our production company as an experimental, art house film company. 

Because of the originality of the technique, all products could easily stand alone.  However, they work strongly together because of the connection in colour, font and strong, captivating images.  All grab the audiences attention with bold statements, and intriguing design.  I think they combine very well and work effectively as a collection.