Qu.2: How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

1. By Katie Hepton Qu.2: How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

2. Importance of targeting you audiences correctly Marketing your film properly is one of the most important things to do in promoting your film the best way to your chosen target audience. If the film has been promoted correctly to the target audience they were aiming for they will get the biggest profit from their film. The film makers need to know exactly who their main target audience from pretty much the outset of filming, so they can get ideas on how to advertise in the best way to that specific target audience. To successfully appeal to the chosen target audience the distributors need to know the best way of advertising their film to the audience. Each target audience is advertise differently, for example you would except to find a film poster of a romantic comedy in a teenage girls magazine, because that’s the target audience they are aiming for. You would not find that film poster however in a Men’s car magazine because they would typically have no interest in that type of film.

3. Strategy Trailer - Our trailer on YouTube Something that will appeal to our target audience a lot is that the two main characters are both young adults trying to survive a totalitarian government. As we are promoting our target audience at young adults this will be a key ingredient that will interest them about our film. The main “Protagonist” (who isn’t actually a protagonist our USP) is a girl. Something which is becoming incredibly popular in dystopian genre films such as ‘How we live now’ and ‘The Hunger Games’ – this would interest maybe more girls to view the film, because predominantly dystopian films are more popular with more male viewers, we our hoping our film will attract a mixed audience. Something we do not show in the trailer but is our USP is that the protagonist who is a girl is actually a false hero, and is working for the government. We try not to highlight this in the trailer and we make the male character look like the main protagonist, so we do not show a lot of the girl making her more mysterious. We also do not give away a lot that happens, with quite simple and vague titles, we wanted the audience to seem intrigued and want to watch the film to find out what happens, and why the government are how they are.

4. Our Films Target Audience The target audience for our film we have chosen to be young adult. Of course other people can see the film but we aim to advertise our film at the age range of 15-30. With the target audience we have chosen possibly the best way to reach them and advertise our film would be the internet. A lot of young adults have grown up with technology and the internet is something most use in their day to day lives. Social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter are perfect to advertise and reach our target audience. At the end of our trailer (Strategy) we have places a hashtag ‘#Strategyfilmuk’. If this got trending on twitter people would see that a lot of people are tweeting about it and then be interested in the film. Youtube is another internet social network site which has rapidly become extremely popular. Trailers are now put on youtube as well as on the TV and with some of our target audience being aimed at teenagers they might watch youtube more than they watch the television. Because the film will be circulating a lot around the internet it would cause people to talk and tell their friends and family about the new film coming out.

5. The certification for our film was going to be a 15 but then even though not shown in the trailer our film would involve violence, gangs and weapons, the best way to attract the right audience was to have the certification for our trailer a 15 as well. I think a good time to release our film would be the start of the October school holidays just before Halloween. As it is in the holidays it would give our target audience a chance to see the film. We would not release our film on the same date as another film with a similar genre as that could effect viewing figures, for example we would not release our film on October 24th because the dystopian film The Maze Runner is set to be released on that date. http://www.launchingfilms.com/release-schedule

6. Our Film Promotion We chose the production company ‘Vertigo’ which is not a mainstream production company so our film would probably come under the title of ‘Indie’. With this our film is not linked with any Hollywood blockbuster producer and audiences might be interested to see a different film rather than the classic Hollywood blockbusters. The film Monsters also went with the production company Vertigo Films because it had a relatively small budget, the film then went on using push promotion using web 2.0. A film we studied 28 days later also did not have a well known production company and had an indie feel to it, the film held its on, and did not copy a lot of Hollywood blockbuster conventions which is something we wanted to do. Vertigo films is a British film production and distribution company, it is most known for the production of Monsters and The Football Factory. It was created in 2002 and is gradually starting to make a name for itself.

7. 28 days later marketing campaign started 5 weeks before the film was released. They advertised it mainly during football game breaks because they were aiming for a more male target audience. They also had teaser trailers as well as the official trailer. They also started online chat rooms to disguise what would actually happen if a zombie apocalypse happened and what you would do, which caused a buzz on the internet. The Matrix is a film we took inspiration from, it was a massive global phenomenon with posters, trailers, and a franchise. Matrix comics were also released after and before the release of the other two films.

8. 28 Days Later also had a pre-release screening where a selected audience get to watch the film and see if they enjoyed or not. The audience did indeed like apart from the ending which then got changed, the original ending audiences viewed was “too bleak”. 28 Days later was released on 27th June 2003 and on its first weekend made $10,061,858 putting at number 4 as the highest grossed film of that weekend. Looking at the website box office Mojo The Matrix was released on March 31st 1999. This is usually the start of the Easter holidays which means more people are likely to go and see it. On the first weekend it was released it made $27,788,331 making it the number 1 viewed film of that weekend. This proves helpful as maybe to get more people to view our film releasing it at the start of a holiday that a lot of people around the world usually have.

9. Festivals Festivals are a really good way to advertise your film, and it gives a chance for directors, stars etc to be interviewed. We chose the Sundance film festival to preview our film at because even though it is a well known film festival lot of the films nominated for some of the categories are not as mainstream and well known as some of the film you would see at Cannes. We also thought it would be good to say we were nominated for an award at the Sundance film festival, fans of this festival would see this and it could bring more recognition for the film.

10. Poster The main image is of the two main characters which are similar age to the audience we are aiming at (young adults). From my research of other dystopian film posters such as The Matrix they used blue, de-saturated colours to create a bleak image which is what we have tried to do with ours. The film title is in the same font as it is in our trailer, we also added the icy steam we have over our text inserts to hint the cryogenics theme. Our tag line “welcome to the new order” hints at the narrative and the totalitarian government bringing a new way of living.

11. Magazine We decided on Total Film as the magazine we wanted to use to promote film as when researching the readership statistics of our magazine, we found that the male to female ratio is more equal, and seeing as we are targeting our film at both genders we found this to be the most useful in attracting our audience. We used the main male protagonist on the front cover because we did not want to give away our USP by using the main female protagonist because it is revealed in the film she is a false hero and we did not want to give that away. To attract readers we used yellow fonts which jump out from the page as well making it a ‘winter’ issue, to make it seem it could be a more interesting issue as it is a winter special.