Evaluation: Question 1

Evaluation: Question 2

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

When creating Welcome Home, it was important for Amber and I to form a brand with our horror, as that would allow for our production to be recognisable to audiences. We aimed to create this brand in a variety of ways within our production, and our ancillary products were needed to reflect on what is contained within the film. Our unique selling points we established across all of our products were:

• Our film logo (using downloaded fonts from the website Cooltext)
• How we used the paranormal/psychological sub-genre
• Our tagline for our poster
• Use of actor (myself) as marketing aid with magazine article

How has cross promotion and marketing been used in the past?

All feature films tend to be released with multiple numbers of ancillary products across a range of platforms. These platforms are usually print based, internet/electronically based or can be a life experience created by the distribution company. This is best shown through how both Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015) and The Hunger Games (2012) were promoted by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures and Lionsgate respectively. A budget of $78 million was used just in the promotion of The Hunger Games, which was thoroughly exploited by the marketing team. Along with the usual print media such as posters and magazine articles/adverts, Lionsgate intended to be creative with their marketing, resulting in the creation of the online treasure hunt. This was designed in order to get the audience to be interactive with the film's marketing, helping them feel like they have helped in the production of the film. This was the same pleasure that audiences felt when they were involved in the capital.pn website, where consumers could create their own personalised items, inspired by the film. 

Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures used synergy to their benefit by teaming up with the video game giants Electronic Arts (EA). For shared profits, the two companies teamed up to create Star Wars: Battlefront, which was used as a promotional tool for the film it coincided with. Both were released in December 2015 and both became one of the biggest products of the year in their fields.  

How did you use cross promotion and marketing in your production?

For Welcome Home, the use of the internet for our promotion would be almost impossible to achieve neither Amber and I did not have the skills or software to create online content (websites, contests etc.), leaving us to use print media as our marketing tool. I decided to head down the traditional root and stick with some of the most common examples of marketing within the film sector; the poster and the magazine article. I used these ancillary products to create recognisable features for my film in different ways. I also wanted our audience to be able to easily recognise the genre of the short film, therefore being able to make predictions on the film. To begin with, I tried to make a recognisable logo for the film using two similar fonts for each ancillary product. Due to issues with the software, some fonts I had downloaded from the internet would not install correctly to both Photoshop and InDesign. The fonts I chose were both made up of block capital letters which were partly filled with colour. I felt this gave the title of my film a decrepit look, encoding the genre well. I also chose the colour red for the font colour as it connotes danger and blood; these are both synonymous with the horror genre and would aid our consumers in identifying what the film would entail. In the film itself,  the opening title scene is also a red coloured block font, helping link all of my products together.

Whilst both ancillary products are linked well together and with the film with its recognisable features, both ancillary products offered different insights into our production. This is a vital for consumers of any major production as each co-product offers new looks into the film they show interest in. The magazine article I created acts as the best insight for consumers as, not only does it offer knowledge on the film, but also on the actor and the behind the scenes experiences. For my article, I chose to include the same base picture as my poster as it offered a fresh take on an already recognised feature of my brand.

All three of the products I have created can be accessed easily online. This is valuable for my film this means my target audience can be reached on a global scale without any costs needed. This means that all of my products can act together to promote my final film to a wider range of new and diverse audiences.

Evaluation: Question 3

                         

Audience Research Questionnaire (with results)

 Audience response to first draft (email responses)

From this information above we were able to draw multiple insights from our target audience in order to improve. From the emails we received, the highlights, both positive and negative, that Amber and I took and utilised were:

• Story- half of the people who responded to our email said that they did not feel that the story was not as fully developed as it could be. To ensure this was not the case when the film was finished, Amber and I decided to emphasise the idea of comfort and bring in the horror earlier so that audiences could gauge what was happening quicker than in the draft.
• Sound- Janvi mentioned that the sound of the film at some points did not match up with the scene and that the transitions from sound to sound were not as smooth as they could be. In our editing, Amber and I dedicated some time to solely focus on sound and to tighten up the transitions from one sound effect to another. We used our knowledge from the creation of our crescendo as this was highlighted as one of our main positives of our film. 
• Camera- some of our shots, including the fridge scene (highlighted by Josie), were described as professional, however, Amy notified us that some of our shots went out of focus and so they had to be re-shot. Amber and I decided to also change the camera shot type and angle to mirror the professionalism that was credited earlier in the film. 

Evaluation: Question 4