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

The teaser trailer, poster and magazine cover are really important when trying to draw in an audience. The movie poster is designed to capture and distill the appeal of the film. For example, the stars, theme, genre, credits and often a tagline to whet audiences' appetites. The poster and the trailer are controlled by the same distributor, along with other audio-visual content such as short and extended clips and making-of material shot on set during production. With a dozen or more different posters on display in a cinema foyer at any one time, there is a lot of competition and distributors and their designers must work hard to make each one stand out, without being untrue to the film.

I went for the simplistic yet effective look with my poster, I've found that sometimes when something is simple and plain it is more attention-grabbing than something thats really busy and detailed, it stands out. I used a picture of the killer on the front and edited it so it looked dark and eery. I kept the detail to a minimum, with just the name of the main protagonist and the director, the name of the movie, the credits, and the age restriction. I used a colour scheme of black, red and white. I put the white mask onto a black background, I think this contrast is really effective. I then wrote the actress' name and directors name in red to connote blood. Behind the title 'Skin Deep' title written in white, I added a dripping blood effect.

For my magazine cover, I created my version of EMPIRE magazine. I used a picture on the front of the main actress and although she is not in character, she has a serious but intriguing look on her face. I used cover lines such as "Fern Anderson reveals all in an EXCLUSIVE! interview," "Behind the scenes photos," and "We chat to the stars of Skin Deep." These are the sorts of cover lines you see on magazine covers when big movies are released. I didn't worry so much about this linking my magazine cover to my trailer and poster because it wouldn't be controlled by the same distributor.

The trailer and poster combined create a lot of publicity. If you don't see the trailer, you are likely to see the poster displayed on buses, bus stops, billboards etc which will hopefully make the audience want to look for the trailer on TV or even YouTube. Therefore the poster plays a very important part in advertising. Although I used a picture of the killer on my poster, he is wearing a mask and it is a very dark picture so you can barely see the killers eyes, this creates a sense of mystery and intrigues the audience. I used the same inter titles in our trailer as a tagline on the poster, "beauty is only skin deep... a knife goes deeper." I thought this was a good touch because if the audience didn't recognise the title of the film, that line may have stuck in their head because it's a common phrase turned on it's head to be dark and shocking.