How effective is the combination of your main

and ancillary texts?

The chosen genre of our short film is social realism therefore we watched some social realism films both feature and short films to get an idea of what the conventions of the films were. We then

researched the films posters to see how the producers created a synergy between the two as we could choose to make a poster as our ancillary task. As a group we chose to focus on the film ‘Fish Tank’ as a guide as this film best related to our films protagonist

and plot.

Our main protagonist Lola is a middle class teenage girl who attends a comprehensive school in a urban area. Lola’s home life affects her entirely as she is surrounded by domestic violence and whilst being in the midst of violence she then isolates her self from her friends resorting into violence her self. The main themes of our film are violence and isolation as we felt that these subject matters are stereotypical of the social realism genre.

When making our film review we used the layout and content of ‘Total Film’ as we felt that this signifies a social realism theme to the review and would be effective when representing our film and review together.

The images we used on our poster anchor our two main themes of isolation and violence that are portrayed in our film. The main image heavily represents isolation as Lola is walking on her own troubled in thought and our sub-image highlights the start of a conflict with Lola’s victims.

Our layout and the theme that we have used on our review also correlates with our protagonist in the film as she is a middle class white girl. This is represented with the sleek black and white effect we have.

When making our poster as our second ancillary product we again decided to focus on ‘Fish Tank’ as a guide of layout, image and colours. ‘Fish Tank’ has a strong corresponding link between their film and film poster. Therefore we decided to use their ideas as inspiration to make something similar but also have our own spin on our products.

Our main product relates to our poster as our image portrays our character feeling isolated and wanting to escape her life. This is emphasised in our film at the end when our protagonist is seen speaking a monologue and expresses that she should go away with her mum to get away from the violence.

The colours of the poster are used to represent a middle class effect on the background and the image. This is represented through Lola’s costume as her uniform looks clean and out of the window in the background you can see council estate houses which are urban but not derilict. In the film this is also represented as the characters look from a middle class background and also our choice of mise-en-scene such as setting was based in a middle class area as this was what was available.

The combination of our main product and ancillary texts is effective as they all link together through our subject matter and themes of our film which are violence and isolation. We represented this fully by using different forms of media to help us and by researching and planning ideas. However I think that we could have used more of a focus on violence and isolation with in the review article. This would have anchored the combination of all three products more effectively. On the other hand I think that overall we create a synergy between all three by portraying the same subject matters throughout.