How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
The three media texts I feel worked well together because they all follow the similar image. The trailer finishes with a shot of Tom shooting into the lens. This image was adapted into the poster and magazine cover to have the same image. They follow the same style through the textured background and edit style of the printed medium. The print medium follows an interlaced editing style. The textured background I feel applied the gritty, and run down aura of the low-budget film. The destruction of the Olympics’ are in people’s mind, as there is great worry and paranoia about a terrorist intervention.
The poster for the movie uses the fonts ‘Courier New’ and ‘TRAJAN PRO’ for different effects. The courier new is a typical film text used for screenplays, which is why we chose to use this in as a predominant text. I chose to use TRAJAN PRO because it’s a professional looking text, which for me, has been a favourite through years of photo editing. The thriller poster is kept fairly simple to pin point the attention onto Tom and gun, and key point the violence in the narrative.
Obviously the trailer cannot have textured images atop to give the footage a gritty aesthetic, which means that we needed to explore that theme through visual and audio. We followed the use of breaking up a long take into sections between action sequences. For example, Tom walking through the corridor leaves the audience pondering where he is going, but shot of the running would indicate that form of a chase and form of action. The visual followed a cleaner rhythm compared to the posters which have a fairly gritty and dirty look to them, the indication that the thriller would a gritty move for the audience.
The magazine obviously had to break from the gritty image to go for a neater and more constructive method to formulate the style to the medium. EMPIRE itself has its own conventions which we had to follow via layout, and the text styles. Although perhaps I am not a fan of some blocky texts such am IMPACT, we had to conform to the conventions to keep your movie hitting as many audiences who follow that magazine religiously.
