Ancillary

This year we had to make a poster and article for the short films that we produced. Collectively, we had to research different film companies posters and how they used certain features to market their film and attract their target audience (mass audience). We thought that creating a connection between the ancillary work and the film was vital, so we looked to achieve this by sticking to the theme and connotations of our film.

Poster

Research

We researched different posters that we found online that could relate to our film production. Here are some that we found and loved:

One of our teachers suggested having a look at the film poster design for a film called 'Drive'. This film is an American Neo-noir Crime film that includes several car chase scenes and high paced action. Because of the film being a similar genre to ours, we knew it would include features that we would be able to use in our film. One of the initial conventions of this poster that I liked was the lighting effects that had been added in order to enhance the aesthetics of the poster. We also liked the large, bold heading as it stood out as well as liking the choice of the image used as it provides with information of what we can expect in the film e.g main protagonist and car chases. From this we knew that we were going to add our main character and or a picture of the car in our ancillary poster.

Vanishing point was another film poster that we researched into, and influenced our poster the most. The angle of the car (head on) was something that I liked the idea of as it allows the rest of the shot to be blurred out, thus making the poster look high speed. I knew that we had several images of the cras we used in similar positions so knew that I could edit it to make it look as good as this. Another aspect of this poster that caught my eye was the typeface.

The angle of the font makes it look like it too is moving at high speed with the road, and almost blends into the road. The blurred effect used for this creates that feeling of speed. There were a lot of conventions of this poster that I used for our finished product.

Our Design

We incorporated all of this research into our final design. Below are a few steps of how I created the poster using Photoshop - a programme that I have had experience with previous to this ancillary task:

Article

Research

We researched different articles to look at how they came across visually as well as the language they used. Here are some that we found online:

When looking for inspiration for the graphics of our article, we used both of the spiderman articles that are on the left. Both of these use a large image which provides the audience with an insight on what the film is like, in our film article we would use an image of our main protagonist, David, as the film revolves around him stealing the bag. Both the articles use a large title with a small synopsis underneath to further provide the audience with information about the film production. These two articles did however vary in layout. The top article uses a background image across the whole of the A3 spread with text layered on top of it in white so that it can be seen over the black background. The other article uses a white background which separates the text from the picture. We couldn't make our mind up with which article design we wanted to go with, so we decided to try both of these out with our film production.

Our Designs

Both of these spiderman articles contributed a great deal to our article designs. We came up with two designs using the articles above as templates and eventually chose one of them. These were designed on Photoshop by Luke:

Final Poster

Final Article

Ancillary

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