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

1. Evaluation of G324 A2 Advanced Portfolio How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

2. Continuity… Continuity is when a product associates itself across every platform e.g. as part of promotions for The Dark Knight, the bat-symbol appeared on the Formula 1 racing car, dominos pizza box, poster, websites, myspace front page, etc. All three of our products did illustrate continuity as they had the same elements that promoted across all platforms. We used similar writing across all three products and we always placed the title of the film on the product to help the audience identify that it belonged to our film. We also ensured that the dream catcher was always visible, as it is somewhat our logo. On the magazine front cover, we had the homeless man holing the dream catcher which he gives to Melody in the film. On the Poster, the two main characters are standing together holding the dream catcher. Alternatively, the hooded-figures mask also served as an alternative symbol which was famously seen on the magazine front cover.

3. …Ancillary Texts The dream catcher is being held by the homeless man, and the symbol of the hooded figures face is seen above the masthead. The dream catcher is being held by the hooded figure. The Hooded-figure’s mask also doubles as a symbol. The dream catcher appears across all our products.

4. …Continuity Another example of continuity was with the implementation of mise-en-scene. The hooded-figure, as he has famously known as, is always wearing a hood and a white mask, which again promotes continuity as the audience will immediately identify his mask and hood as belonging to our film, just as audiences associate the bat-symbol with The Dark Knight and the hockey mask with Jason Voorhees of Friday The 13th fame.

5. …Hooded Figure When creating the hooded figure, we were inspired by some horror characters, most notably Jason Voorhees and the Scream Killer. We liked the idea of the mask as it gives the killer a mysterious identity, and seeing as our villain is not particularly of this world, his face is that much more of a mystery. Their mask are easily identified by audiences, so our intentions were to give our character a mask so that he too would be easily recognised by audiences.

6. …Cross-media Promotion We also implemented cross-media promotion to further our continuity and audience awareness. Cross-media promotion is when various mediums and products are used to promote a single idea. For example: The marketing team for the 2008 film “The Dark Knight” promoted the film in various ways including: merchandising, viral marketing, TV Spots, 32 websites, a bestselling game and many more. It proved to be a winning strategy as the film went on to gross more than a billion at the worldwide box office and today stands as the fifth highest grossing film of all time! We utilised cross-media promotion to promote the film using various online mediums that were common with our target audience. The Dark Knight targeted geeks with their strategy, just as we are targeting youths.

7. …Youtube We created a Youtube channel ‘DreamcatcherOfficial’ for two reasons: the first was because it was a compulsory condition of our coursework – we were to upload our finished teaser trailer to Youtube, but we decided to make a private account for our film which also somewhat served as our website. We also welcomed comments on our Youtube channel and video as we wanted to know how our audience felt about our production and how they felt about the quality of our video. We also wanted to know their opinions to know what to change or if we should keep it the same. So far we’ve received very positive comments however there were one or two negative/irrelevant comments. We chose Youtube because we felt it was the best way to reach our target audience of youths between 17-25, as they are most likely to be very technologically literate at using such technologies as Youtube. Although the video was getting views, we wanted to enhance them and we just didn’t feel that Youtube was the best way to target our audience so we looked at other strategies…

8. …DreamcatcherOfficial

9. …Facebook 67% of youths are rumoured to be signed on facebook - an online social networking website that allows people to stay in touch at the click of the mouse. We all felt that the best way to reach out target audience was with the use of facebook. Most of our friends who just so happen to be our target audience were signed onto to facebook so we made a facebook group about our film. However, the limitation of making a facebook group meant that non-facebook users wouldn’t be able to access the group, so we also made a facebook page that can be accessed both by facebook users and non-facebook users too. We placed links to our Youtube trailer on our facebook page and we got a substantial increase in views after that. We also added a link to our Youtube channel and twitter account.

10. …Official Facebook Page On this sied is the Facebook page, which can be accessed by everyone, whethere they’re on facebook or not. On this sied is the Facebook group, which is only accessible to users on facebook. Poth pages look the same, however the facebook page has more information than the group.

11. …Twitter Twitter is a social networking site that allows users to make updates in 140 characters or less. We made a twitter account because we noticed that a lot of our target audience happened to be on twitter. The ‘hoodedfigure’ twitter account focused on the Hooded Figure who posted updates about the many ways he was torturing Melody throughout the day. This extended the audiences experience of the film. It was a similar move to what the Dark Knight did with the Joker who was constantly taking over Gotham themed websites. The Dark Knight marketing team released 32 websites that were all vandalised by the Joker. We wanted the audience to understand the Hooded figure as he doesn’t have any lines so it would make sense to allow them to understand him better. So in a sense, our character was taking over twitter to brag about the cruel things he was doing to Melody – similar to the way the joker defaced the Gotham websites.

12. …‘hoodedfigure’ Twitter Account

13. …Conclusion We adopted these promotional tactics because it got us closer to our target audience – as we had a personal relationship, it motivated them to spread the word on our facebook pages and twitter account. It proved to be a winning success as we have over 500views and counting. We intended to do so much more but we didn’t have enough time. We began constructing a website using freewebs, however we didn’t manage to finish it in time and it required a lot of attention. We also wanted to do a blog called ‘Melody’s Diary’, but sadly time was not on our side.