Evaluation, Question 2: How effective is the combination of your main product and its ancillary texts?

Reads:
Throughout the production of our film and its ancillary texts, our intention as a group was to send out a warning about peer pressure and the consequences that surround it. I believe that our film sends out this message effectively as we use a combination of believable characters and settings that our audience can relate to and a dramatic event to shock and educate our audience through the reception of our message.

Our radio trailer was created in Final Cut Express and features music, a narrative voiceover and sound snippets from our film. I believe that they all blend together well to create an authentic sounding radio trailer that will impress and interest an audience. As well as making our trailer sound authentic, we focused on getting across the message that a character in our film has to make some decisions surrounding fitting in by using snippets such as "It's a laugh, you won't regret it" and "Don't be a spoil sport" to present how others can encourage a person's decision. To relate this to our listener and get them to think, we ask them, "But how far would you go to fit in?" to make them consider potential consequences of succumbing to peer pressure, and therefore suggesting that there's a dark twist in our story and thus it can be dangerous attempting to fit in.

Our film poster, which was created in Photoshop using an image we took in a photography studio, also features the same rhetorical question as our radio trailer, "How far would you go to fit in?" which once again makes our audience consider whether fitting in is worth it. The colours used within our poster are mainly reds and blacks and therefore create a sinister feel within our poster. The main image is of the two main characters in our film, Alice and Fiona. I believe that this image is very important and portrays the meaning of our film excellently as it shows the power one person can hold over another, and thus how they can mislead them, as Alice has a grip of Fiona's shoulder and is shown to look very smug while Fiona looks innocent and unknowing.

I believe that our ancillary texts are very effective in selling our main production as there is a sense of synergy between them all and they intrigue our audience in a dark, sinister manner through posing a question to them which will ultimately make them curious about our film's story and thus want to see it. Our ancillary texts comply with Steve Neale's theory of genre as they send out a sinister feel and could potentially make an audience expect a thriller, however our genre is different to what our ancillary texts suggest, and so the shock value of our film will be even greater when the audience realises that they predicted the film incorrectly. This could also potentially make our film more memorable as it wasn't just another typical genre film that most people could predict the ending to.