In what way does your media product use, develop or challenge conventions of real media

products?

Media products

Our coursework insisted of producing 3 types of media products.

1. A teaser trailer that was no longer than 2 minutes, it would based around the horror genre and would have a specific theme, for example our theme was poltergeists and ghosts.

2. A poster, that linked in with the trailer, we produced a theatrical poster and a teaser poster both with strong images on the front.

3. A magazine cover, that also linked in with our trailer and posters, we produced a special subscribers addition magazine cover and a normal public magazine cover.

Trailer As a group the first thing we focused on was a trailer, to do this we had to research into

other trailers in the same sub genre to insure that we were able to correctly pull this together. We needed to see how other poltergeist movie trailers were made and shot

so we could take aspects of there work and make it into our own.

The three trailers we looked at were The woman in black, Dark Water and The Apparition these trailers all were in the horror genre and under the ghost/poltergeist sub genre. We really researched in depth into these trailers and picked out a few things we could

use in our trailer.

Through out our trailer we use conventions of a real horror trailer from using similar shots to producing our own ‘coming soon’ sign/logo.

Ch

arlotte Teaser T

railer link

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Making our media product look professional was important as we wanted the audience to feel like it was a proper trailer, therefore at the beginning of our trailer we inserted a ‘Restricted audiences only’ shot, this let the audience know that our movie trailer was age restricted because of the level of scariness. The woman in black trailer had a ‘appropriate audiences’ shot at the beginning of there trailer to also let the public know what they were watching was only appropriate for a certain age group.

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While watching The Woman in Black trailer a really effective shot stood our for us, while actor Daniel Radcliffe was stood at the window, a ghostly figure appears behind him. We took this shot and tweaked it making it fit into our media product; 30 seconds into our trailer and Character Grace is lighting a cigarette while doing this a ghostly figure appears behind her, turns left and walks sharply away.

This is a popular shot in ghostly horror films so when our audience sees this we hope they link this shot to other successful movie trailers. This shows that we have taken into account the type of shots used in other movie trailers and interpreted that into our own work.

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At the beginning of most movie trailers they have location shots to show the audience where the story is being set. In The Woman in Black there is a long shot of the house where the story is set, therefore we shot the castle where Charlotte was set to again show the audience where the story is being set. In Dark Water there is an establishing shot of the city where the film is set, so we shot an establishing shot of the area around the castle to show the audience the solitude around the building. These shots a great for the beginning of a trailer because it really gives the audience and idea of what's going on and keeps them in suspense for the rest of the film.

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At the very end of trailers there is usually a cut from the footage to a slide saying ‘coming soon’. We made our own coming soon sing to make it look similar to the Woman in Blacks coming soon sign, the letters have various lines coming off them to make them look spooky, however the producers of The Woman in Black have a lot more effects and there ‘coming soon’ was written onto a window that was fogged up; we didn’t have many effects so added a simple glow to it making it come off the screen.

PosterThe second media product we focused on making were some posters to go along with our

trailer. We really needed to make sure we were using the same conventions as a real film poster as we wanted the poster to look as real as possible. We produced two

posters on Photoshop, one was a theatrical poster which would be on billboards, bus stops and on the wall outside cinemas, the other poster was a teaser poster; it would

be situated in magazines, newspapers and on social networking sites. The two posters are closely linked together using the same font and colour palette. We looked at

various other film posters from movies such as The woman in Black, The Grudge and dark water, these helped us produced our final outcomes and inspired us to create a

strong image.

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These were the posters we looked at for inspiration, we took elements from each poster and added them into the theatrical poster to make it as scary as possible. We chose these posters because they all have strong images on the front, the title and font stand out immensely and they all are professional .

The main elements we took the close up image of the main characters face, the actors names, colour schemes and credits at the bottom of the poster

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The close up pale face of Daniel Radcliffe inspired the picture on our poster, I edited the picture so our character looked more ghostly. We made sure our character was looking in to the camera just like Daniel was to make it seam like she’s looking at you, the audience.

We put credits at the bottom of our Charlotte poster like the credits on the bottom of the Dark water poster, this make sour poster look more professional.

[Theatrical Poster]

Our character is made to look like she has come from the sea with her hair covering her face and her eye popping through, abit like the image from the Grudge poster.

At the top of the Woman in Black poster there was The Actors name in capital letters to show the importance of their role, we have done the same. We have put the names of our main actors at the top of the poster to show how important they are.

Continued..This is our teaser poster which would be released a few months before our theatrical poster, we have colour coordinated posters so they go together using the colour palette of Grey, Black, White and Red.

In both posters we took the images and made the ‘Charlotte’ and ‘Coming soon’ logos on a programme called in design. We edited the images on Photoshop making the image for a theatrical poster duller and the image on our teaser poster greyscale. The image on the teaser poster was take while filming our location shots, we think it’s a strong picture because it mainly shows the castle which was the main idea as it is the main location and over to the right it shoes you the wood where some of our trailer was shot, then at the front of the image there is a tree which has no leaves, just branches. It creates a creepy feel to the poster and gives it an extra edge. This challenges the conventions of a poltergeist/horror poster because they don’t usually use a location image for a poster, it would make our poster stand out more from others and maybe raise a few questions with the audience.

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Similar to the conventions of a real film poster we have colour coordinated our posters and made them link together. ‘Charlotte’ is in white and the ‘coming soon’ and the date are both in red. This is so the reader/audience can see that even though the poster images are completely different, the posters are in fact linked together and are promoting the same film.

Magazine CoverThe third media product we produced was a magazine front cover. We had to research into other film magazines and find out what went on and in a film magazine. We did this so we

could get a real feel for movie magazines so our front cover could portray a real one. We based out magazine around a well know film magazine ‘Empire’ this lead us to produce two

magazine covers one special edition cover for subscribers and one normal cover for any consumer to buy.

The two posters are linked together using the same image, font and colour theme, The only difference is that the special edition issue does not have an tag lines on it purely so the

reader will be able to see the main image more.

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Empire put the title of the movie and a tag line underneath in the middle of the cover so we have done the same, this is so it stands out and draws in the reader.

At the bottom of Empire they advertised that there was two covers to collect. Similar to theres we have advertised that there are two posters to collect. This persuades the reader to buy the magazine.

The masthead of Empire is in bold red capital letters, we have done the same because capitals stands out more and the colour red links in well with our posters.

All magazines have barcodes we added one on to ours to make it look like a real media product.

We have used and developed the same conventions featured on Empires cover, for example our tag lines are similar but we have slightly changed ours to suit our magazine.

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This is a subscribers addition to empire magazine, it features the masthead, the main image, barcode, date and a small tag line on the right hand side This is really effective because you can see the image more and it makes the magazine look more strong.

This is our subscribers edition, like empire we have featured the masthead in capitals with the date directly under it, we have removed the majority of our tag lines and placed the name of the magazine in the middle. Also like empire you can see more of the main image.

MASTHEAD

DATE

MOVIE TAGLINE

MAIN IMAGE

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This is a comparison of Empires front cover and our front cover, as you can see some things are the same, the barcode, movie title, masthead. However some things are different as we challenged and developed the conventions of this media product to make ours individual.

Summery We have used, developed and challenged the conventions of a media magazine. We have looked closely at Empire magazine and used the conventions they have used, however we

have slightly developed some to put our own twist on our magazine.

We have used, developed and challenged the conventions of a film poster. Our theatrical poster is very similar to any film poster, and that shows how we have used the same

conventions, however we developed this by creating a second teaser poster that was different to any other film posters.

We have used, developed and challenged the conventions of a teaser trailer, we have made it professions and used the same conventions by adding in a parental clip before the movie and ending it with a ‘coming soon’ sign. We have challenged and developed the conventions of a teaser trailer by using similar shots that other trailers have used but changing them to make

it our own.

Fleur Gascoigne

Shauni Brown

Rosie Bridle