Post Production improvements to ancillary tasks

In terms of my ancillary tasks I had to undertake a lot of post production work and develop new skills to improve the overall quality of my film magazine cover and film poster.  On reflection, I think that I could have saved myself a lot of work by having a clearer specific target audience in mind (ie main audience teenage girls and secondary niche audience tennis fans) as trying to appeal to a wider market resulted in the creation of initial products that didn’t have a consistent “house style” or brand identity across the 3 platforms. Through a continuous cycle of drafting, designing, editing, consulting and redrafting in the post production phase I eventually produced a range of products that appeal to my target audience and have intertextuality.

-          Through the use of Photoshop software and the magic wand tool I erased the dark background of my main photograph which was then of sufficient quality to use on both the film poster and the film magazine.  It also allowed me to adhere to the conventional presentation techniques used on the front cover whereby a single image is used and overlaid with text.

-          Through revisiting the research undertaken into media texts with a clear target audience in mind I used colour symbolism more effectively.  The conventional pink became more evident across the range of products.  The background of the tennis court on the poster was filled with pink and all text relating to the film on the magazine cover was pink.  The colour scheme on the magazine was edited to create a summery feel reflecting the seasonality of the edition which is a conventional feature of magazines targeting women as it denotes the contemporary nature of the publication.

-          From target audience feedback and revisiting the real media texts I also changed the title of my film magazine from Focus on Film to a conventional single word title “Flicks.”  This was more appealing to my target audience, has connotations with “chick flicks” and a nostalgic relevance as flicks is an old world for cinema.  It directly associated the magazine brand of my production company “Sports Flick Films” which also produce the magazine.  The choice of font used for the title / masthead “flicks” was consistent across all products encouraging image association.

-          Conventional features of both magazines and posters were added during post production to add to the overall realism of the products.  A facebook link, age certificate symbol and company credits were added to the film poster whilst barcodes, issue number, dates, competitions and free offers were added to the magazine cover.

-          I also used Photoshop to create a simple company logo that could brand the media product across all 3 platforms.  My initial logo was a combination of clipart pictures of sports equipment which was not easily reproducible in the small space of poster / magazine covers. 
I looked at sports firms logos eg adidas and produced a sharper, abstract image and retained the pink colour symbolism and same font on the “flick” to provide intertextuality and visual association across all 3 products.