Conventions of our chosen ancilliary products

Poster

A poster is a very important part of marketing a film, they are shown in places where the trailer cannot be, for example at bus stops or on cinema walls. They give the viewer an idea of what the film will be like within just one glance.

Common conventions of a poster are:

• It must be eye-catching and captivating to the audience
• There must be a focal picture that will draw in the audiences eye
• The title is displayed in a large, eye-catching font
• It clearly defines the genre of the film
• The poster should be designed to attract the largest audience possible of the correct nature
• There is usually an indication of when the film is being released; sometimes a specific date is displayed but usually a generic time of 'Coming Soon' or 'This Summer' is displayed
• Information about the Director and Production Company must be shown within the billing block usually placed at the bottom of the poster
• Sometimes reviews or titles of other films made by the same company are shown (From the makers of...)

Take ‘The Imitation Game’ poster for example;

Firstly the dim and dark photo and the red and white colour schemes would suggest a thriller or horror genre movie yet looking at the photo we don’t see any spooky or eerie happenings so it is likely that the film will not be a horror.

The title can be clearly seen at the bottom of the poster, it is in capital letters and coloured red which makes it stand out but also makes it memorable.

Just above the title we can see the two main characters names, not only does this increase the target audience due to a fan base but it also increases the standing of the film before anyone has even seen it because many people will assume that the film will be good because of the fantastic actors involved.

Underneath the title the date of release is displayed along with production company logos. This gives the viewer of the poster an idea of when to watch out for the film’s release and also gives credit to the production companies and distributors. 

At the top of the poster there is a tagline that reads, ‘The true enigma was the man who cracked the code’ which establishes to the audience that this movie will be based on the enigma code from WW2 but also that it will be about the man behind it all so perhaps the film will be a biography.

However, because our film is a horror then it would be wise to look up posters from horror films.

 Whilst looking at these I have come to realise that it is very common that the image used is a close up of the ghost/demon that is the antagonist in the film. This is quite useful for us as we too should consider taking a close up of Cassandra as a ghost to use for our film poster.

Again there is a common colour theme of red, white and black. Sometimes a hint of green where the movie contains themes of envy and jealousy which in fact our movie does contain elements of these so we might also consider a green tint.

Here I have created a plan for our own poster based on my research: 

Website

Websites are a vital component when creating a film because it is a place that the audience can visit to find out everything about the movie.

Common website conventions are:

• The Website needs to make sure that the design is effective and easily usable, it needs to be clear, logical and easily navigated
• The center of the website usually presents the main content with navigation tools to the left and/or accross the top containing links to pages with more detailed content
• Modern websites usually have technical codes containing moving images, sound and audience interaction. This is sometimes related to the content of a film marketing site which offer downloads such as music, posters or DVD's.
• As well as the content leading layout and design choice, where websites are based on existing genres the web design uses recognisable codes and conventions from the genres to make sure the audiences can recognise the genre and that they are framed to have certain expectations of the website.

I have taken a look at recent horror films website to get inspiration for our own website. Here is the home page for the website of Annabelle. 

I think that this is a really effective homepage because you can instantly see lots of information in one place. Very noticeable is the film title in red, it stands out to make it memorable just like the posters. You can also see the link with the movie, ‘The Conjuring’ which is very important for the makers of this movies as Annabelle is the prequel to The Conjuring and connecting the movie in this way increases the audience as fans of The Conjuring are likely to see this and then want to watch Annabelle.

We can also see DVD promotions which allow fans to find out where they can purchase a DVD copy of the film which increases the film’s overall proceedings. And finally there is a link to watch the trailer. 

Along the top there is an easy to use toolbar in which the user can navigate through the website. This is really useful and efficient because if the user couldn’t easily navigate the website then they would become irritated and leave however using a toolbar it is all there in one place.

On the end you’ll notice, there are various links to other social networking pages, and using social network in this way it allows fans to communicate across the globe which of course widens the audience but also brings across more awareness about the film, this has proven to be a very useful means of promoting a movie. 

At the bottom of every page on the website there is a credit list which includes the names and logos of the production companies but it also has the date in which the film is released and at the very bottom are links to terms and conditions and also further companies that must have worked alongside with Annabelle such as ‘MPAA’ and ‘Film Ratings’.

There is also an exciting link on the toolbar labelled, ‘Become Annabelle’ which sends you to a game that you can play. This interactive part of the website increases awareness of the film as viewers may suggest to friends that they should also play the game

Below I have designed a flowchart as to how I think the website should look according to what I have found out today:

Production Diary - 5/12/14

 This film shoot was definitely our biggest one because we had the most amount of actors together at one time. This meant that as the Producer I had to do a lot of extra work to get everyone together.

One of the main reasons that I found this a lot of work was the fact that as we are filming with children I had to organise everyone through their parents and I had to make sure that on the chosen date they could get picked up and dropped off or I organised to drive certain members of the cast.

Here are a couple of screenshots of my conversations with the parents;

However I finally manged to establish a day when every actor was free, Sophie had to come an hour later which meant that she would miss out on filming one of the scenes which we had to do before it got dark. Nevertheless we managed to put together a call sheet for the evening of filming:

The actual evening went really well and everyone looked great and in-character. I was definitely pleased with this film shoot because we didn't really come across any errors or problems and we managed to get all the shots done which is especially good because this means we don't have to arrange everyone to meet again.

The one minor problem we came across was that during the location recce we had found only one room suitable for the 1940's because it has wooden stools and wooden tables, however we had forgotten that it would have gone dark outside and that would ruin the reality of it being set during a school day, luckily Hannah came up with the idea of closing the blinds so that we couldn't tell how light it was outside. The picture below shows me and Hannah practicing the focus pull in that room. 

In the first scene that we filmed on this day one of the bullies rips a page from Cassandras book and we then show a close up of the ripped page. The page that we wanted ripping was of a drawing of her family and the page tears her family away from Cassandra. To ensure that when our actor ripped the page it was in the correct place we scored a line in the correct place using scissors.  

If we could do this shoot again I perhaps would have practiced the focus pull beforehand because this took up quite a lot of vital time and we had to do this section a lot of times only to get one decent shot.