Question 1

In what ways does your media product use develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media product?

We wanted to make our media product look as realistic as possible, so we looked at different teaser trailers from the same genre and we did textual analysis on them. We noticed that in most of the trailers we looked at held the same conventions but used them in different ways to make there trailers more effective. 

Here are some of the trailers we looked at....

 devil (2010)

 

 

The house of wax (2005)

From these trailers we found a range of different methods to make the trailer effective for example using short fast clips gives the audience a taste of the film with out giving too much away. We then discovered that if you put a creepy soundtrack with the short clips then it makes your trailer look more intense and this builds up the suspense there for achieving the goal of a horror trailer. We took this into consideration and decided to use short quick clips also, this at first proved difficult because we didn’t know what footage too keep or to get rid of and ended up having a four minute trailer, but we eventually cut it down to 1 min 25 which is the typical length of a teaser trailer. We also found from the trailers we watched that there is a lot of use of jump scares which I think are very effective because if you can make an audience jump from just a trailer they will probably want to see the film more because they will expect it to be very scary and entertaining, so we decided to use this method in our trailer also, in the last clip of our trailer we make it seem as if the trailer has ended when the door slams but as it fades we then added a loud banging on the door, which I think is an effective way of making the audience that is watching the trailer jump. We also added crashes to when text appeared on screen to make the meaning behind the words on screen seem more powerful and intense. I think that the main thing you need to remember for teaser trailers are that you shouldn’t give too much away because no one will want to go see the film if they already know what is going to happen, and I think with our trailer we showed enough for the audience to want to go see it but not enough for them to guess the ending because they don’t know who or what the killer is or if they all die or one survives etc. I think with our trailer we stuck to the stereotypical conventions of horror because we wanted to make it look as realistic as possible so we chose to use what we knew worked well with this particular genre for example the setting is an old church, and old abandoned places are usually where horrors are set, as you can see from "the house of wax" trailer, but I think that we also challenge the conventions of this particular genre because of the narrative of our film, we took different ideas from the different sub genres of horror e.g. its a supernatural horror but the characters get murdered as if it was a slasher movie. I think this is quite an original idea for a horror movie and i think that it works well.

I think that the film poster I created conforms to the stereotypical conventions of this supernatural horror I decided to use a dark gloomy background to represent the kind of film this would be, I also included company logos to make my poster look more realistic. I decided to put the film name in a big bold red font to make it stand out from the dull black background, also the colour red could represent blood and foreshadow what will happen in the film. I also included the films website to make the poster look official, I based my media product on the grudge film poster because I thought that was very effective and intense poster and it attracts the audiences eye.

As you can see with my poster and the grudge poster they both have the image of someone with there over there face, which gives the character a sense of mysteriousness, which is what i wanted because i didn't want people to guess who the killer is or why they are killing the other people. Its as if the hair in front of the face forms a mask or a hidden identity. Which i think is a very effective method because this i personally think is quite a disturbing image so i think it attracts the audience because they look at it and try and work out what it actually is. With my film poster i think i conformed completely too the stereotypical conventions of this media product because i wanted it to look as scary and realistic as possible but i think i made it more individual and unique with the title and the tag line e.g. the film is called "the secret" and the tag line is "don't say it" i think that these work well together because they link with the trailer and the poster.

With my magazine cover I looked at other magazines like empire to see what layouts look best or what fonts work well with each other, etc. I thought of the name of my magazine randomly it was the first name that came to my head and I think that it worked quite well and sounds like a real magazine name. The magazine cover took the longest time to create because every time I added a new picture or a new piece of text, I would have to move stuff about to make the layout look realistic and not messy. I included the date, the bar code and the magazines website to make it look even more authentic. Again I think with this media product I stuck to the conventions as well because I wanted this piece to look as realistic as possible. I used quite a dark and gloomy colour scheme to with the misenscene of the film the magazine was promoting. I chose that central image because it makes that particular character look quite dominant but also quite scared I did this because then it would confuse people as too who the killer really it gives a sense of uneasiness like something bad could happen at any point.

As you can see i decided to use the same kind of font and colour for my magazine name, i chose this because i thought that it really made the name stand out from the dark background and because the colour red connotes danger. I also used the same kind of buzz words e.g. "we name the top 10 horror films of all time" because i think this makes the magazine look realistic and it attracts the audiences eye.

I conclusion I think that all three of my media products conform to the stereotypical conventions of this genre because then that way the products look more realistic and genuine, and you know that this is the kind of thing that works well because it’s the conventions of horror, but I think that we also have our individuality on the film trailer because the narrative behind it is quite different from most films, even from just by the location its set in, the people playing the characters, etc. So there for I think that we have both developed and challenged the stereotypical conventions of this genre