Our Promotional Package

When producing our overall promotional package, it was important that we kept our audience and genre in mind when creating our teaser trailer, poster and magazine.

Teaser Trailer
What was the purpose?
To attract and intrigue our target audience.

As a group, we decided to attempt to represent the gender in order to appeal to the female audience and to also show the stereotypical view of males being more superior to women and the 'supposed' reality of social issues, crimes and in particular prejudice against women. We used this stereotype to be convential and enable the audience to identity the social realities. In some ways, we could say that our package represented Laura Mulvey's 'Male Gaze' theory in the way that the woman is seen as the vulnerable, fragile, weak one. On the other hand, we could say that because the female is the centre of events, she has a story to tell and could consequently be the one to overcome struggle and almost be an inspiration. We really attemtped to make our audience recognise the dominant ideology of stereotpying women as weak and inferior to present our socially dramatic genre and in order to achieve this, we tried to make her seem like a typical woman by using props and mise-en-scene, like the make up in the bathroom shots to represent her stereotypical feminity. This also meant that we were attempting hegemony.

Poster and Magazine
What was the purpose?
To advertise and therefore attract our potential audience.

In my opinion, the images shown on both our film poster and magazine really showed the dramatic genre of our film. We wanted to make both images extremely dramatic and therefore almost like a statement, presenting issues of domestic violence. Our main purpose was to shock our target audience and we used the computer programme Photoshop to make the poster and magazine much more dramatic. We also tried to make the poster image look like a Police snapshot shwoing the evident bruises and marks to give the audience a hint of the storyline and narrative.

Order of promotion
Conventionally, the teaser trailer would be the first thing to be shown, following the poster and lastly the magazine. However, with the film Cloverfield, the teaser poster was the first thing to be published. The Cloverfield producers also included codes and underlying messages in order to encourage their audience to research their film.

Cloverfield: Pre-realease Plot Speculation

"Members of the forums at argn.com and unfiction.com have investigated the background of the film, with the "1-18-08" section at Unfiction generating over 7,700 posts in August 2007."

Our group however, decided not to do this, mainly because our film was a drama rather than that of a 'distaster-monster' genre. We wanted to keep things as real and hard-hitting as possible, which meant that our film would most likely be seen on TV on a drama film channel (like our film distributor FILM4.)