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

Research into trailers

1. The main convention of horror trailers I found was that the at the start they had quite long, slow shots and as the trailer progressed the shots became more closely cut, and much, much shorter. This would be to build a form of tension, and ‘fear’ in the audience.

2. The trailers also typically showed little of the ‘monster’, as the added an element of mystery. However, the trailers also tended to ‘set the scene’ rather than show you to much of the horror elements. They did this by showing the audience the main characters and also showed you where the film is set i.e. The Hills Have Eyes in the desert of New Mexico.

Research into Trailers continued3. More specifically,

conventions of hand-held style horrors, such as Paranormal Activity, made it obvious, as soon as possible, that the format of the horror is hand-held.

4. First person horrors also used the static effect often, to show ‘something's wrong’, and to give the trailer a more realistic feel.

How my film relates to conventions

1. My film stuck to the convention of my first point in that it started of quite slow, with mostly just the main character talking to the audience, which is a reasonably long cut. However, I didn’t stick rigidly to this convention, as I added in a chase scene in the middle of the two dialogue scenes. I did this to tell the audience what genre my film and to, ultimately, stop the audience getting bored with it.

How my film relates to conventions 2 Like ‘Paranormal Activity’

trailer, I used the static effect. This is to give it an authentic, ‘realist’ feel.

Like in the ‘Hills Have Eyes’ trailer, I used black and white ‘old’ style stills, accompanied by a camera clicking sound effect. This was to make it seem like a real crime scene that had been discovered.

Also, I stuck to convention of using lots of text to explain my trailer, so people know what is happening

To what extent are the narrative theories of Prop/Todorov/Levi-Strauss etc relevant/interesting in relation to the narrative of the trailer. Is it possible to even consider your trailer as a narrative?

Like most horror trailers, mine has a basic narrative. This is mainly put forward by the title text, explaining what the film is.

However, in my trailer there was no established ‘baddy’, and my trailer showed more action and violence rather that actual plot.

•Trailers, especially teasers can’t really, by their nature, establish a true idea of plot. They’re designed to make people want to see more, but if the whole plot, beginning, middle and end, are all established in the trailer, people aren’t going to be interested.

•Instead, you want to show the start of the film the ‘equilibrium’ and maybe show a disturbance of that equilibrium. Trailers often don’t show what that disturbance, but sometimes do. Rarely will the end of a movie, or the supposed end, will be shown in the trailer. This is were I broke the convention, in that I show a dead body at the end of the trailer. This is because 1. I think that people understand horrors enough to know what will happen and 2. I wanted to make my trailer look like ‘real’ or ‘leaked’ footage of an actually murder, similar to the way The Blair Witch Project worked.

To what extent your trailer conforms with genre expectations?

Although I said earlier that no clear ‘bad guy’ was shown, I made it obvious that there is a ‘bad guy’. In most horror trailers there is at least a allusion to danger, and something to fear. I did this personally by showing chase scenes and shots like the picture, where the evil character is directly attacking the cameraman. This involves the audience, which is what most horror trailers try to do in some way.

Conventions of posters1. The obvious convention of

horror posters, if the use of the colour red, which has been used in pretty much every poster I’ve looked at. Red is quite a naturally ‘horror’ colour, as blood and red are often linked, and blood is obviously a key feature of horror movies.

2. All of these posters only use from a small pallet of colours, which makes parts stand out, such as red writing on a black background.

3. They also use quite basic pictures, with nothing that stands out to much, rather just sits in the background while the title, taglines, actors etc stand out in front of them.

How my poster relates to conventions1. The colour red has been key in

both of my posters. For my A4(ish) sized poster it is the main background colour, keeping to that ‘horror’ feel. In the long poster, it brings out the text, highlighting the ‘stars’ of the film and the title, while keeping that horror feel I was going for.

2. My posters also use from a small pallet of colours; red, white and black. This is to keep to the typical basic almost rustic feel.

3. Like the posters I looked at, the picture is quite basic making the person stand out, as well as making the title and actor names more clear.

Conventions of magazine covers

1. First of all, the cover picture of all these magazines have the actors ‘in character’ on the front, rather than the actors just being themselves. This makes the cover story more obvious to what it is. For example, at a glance you could easily recognise that the top left one was Lord of the Rings without even seeing the title.

2. There seems to be a lot of different colours, rather than one set colour scheme. I guess this makes all parts of the magazine stand out rather than one part shadowing another.

3. There’s also a lot going on in the page. There are very few blank spaces on the page, even the pictures cover up the title. This gives an impression to someone who glances at the cover that it has a lot in it.

1. Although my cover picture is my actor ‘in character’, I don’t think it’s as obvious as the other covers I looked at. Looking at other magazines, they never seem to have a horror movie as their cover story, so mine will seem a bit different.

2. I feel that my colour scheme is somewhat varied, with yellow black, white, and red used in the font etc. however, it’s not as ‘all over the place’ as the over covers. I feel that the movie magazine covers I looked at had too much colour, everything seemed to clash, and it made the covers not very pleasing to look at.

3. Like the colour, I don’t think I had as much going on as over magazine covers. Although some had a similar amount going on as mine (i.e. the Watchmen cover) I didn’t have as many things happening at once. This was because I think that people judge the magazine by it’s cover story, rather than the other things happening.