In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge

forms and conventions of real media product?

By Emmanuella Hagan

During research I noticed that the convention of mosthorror genre posters had either the protagonist orantagonist as the photo finish and looking at some posterslike Scream, HATES (House at the end of the Street), Dragme to hell and various other posters the basic conventionof this is seen but I felt that the posters like Cabin in thewoods, SAW II and Alien show a similar but different sideof the convention by not showing the antagonist orprotagonist but having an object to represent that movielike location, object or something relating to the movie,with this I think it entices the audience more and makesthem more interested in what the film may be about.

Cabin in the woods had the twisted up house andthe audience would wonder it has to do with themovie, Saw II had the broken finger nail and Alienhad this spaceship looking egg or something likethat, taking these examples I decided to base mytrailer poster on the combination of both theconcepts of Cabin in the woods and a bit of thebasic convention of the protagonist.

I decided to incorporate these ideas from theresearch, so for my poster I used one of thelocations from the trailer and the antagonist,through this I felt that it would make the not onlycompliment the other tasks but also tells the storyin its own way. To accomplish I aim to use somecontrasting, colour balancing and blending to allowthe location and the antagonist stand out and havea certain atmosphere to it.

Before planning my trailer I did some research into the genre of Horrorand Thriller movie trailers to make further my understanding of thecodes and conventions of them so I will be able to incorporate it into mytrailer. Some trailers like HATES and the Stepfather which has s confusingbut clear story line at the beginning then as it goes through it gets moreconfusing and clearer in somewhat way as the horror is being revealed.Watching these clips showed me the importance of horror and effectsthat have to be in the trailer and it also opened my understanding to theimportance of lighting in the trailers. It is clear that dark lighting is usedvery much in horror trailers, there is also a used of high key lighting thatis used to present and show the twist of the story and allow the audienceto understand what is going on an looking at this as one of the importantconventions for horror genre-d films it has been put into account andpresent in my trailer.

Analysing HATES and the Pact gave me the idea of representingthe clash between good and devil with a puzzling storyline andshowing most of the characters to the audience for them to tryand guess the storyline themselves, doing this I thought mayentice the audience more in getting them interested andguessing what may happen in the movie.Looking at the linearity of the Pact and HATES and theStepfather (another trailer that has a similar base story of mine)I noticed that it was pretty neat with the characters and whatthey are there for, however the revealing of the story is stillhidden in somewhat way and the evidence of how it would end.With the Stepfather it works well with it because it also includedsome crazy mind games.

Music

For music I found that it is a very key convention inbuilding certain suspense and atmosphere for the trailer.Eerie, heavy and tension building music is present and asignificant in horror trailer. Also this is mostly non diegeticsound, diegetic sound is also important to help presentthe narrative and motion of the trailer.The jump scenes which are present in most film trailersare also included in mine because my storyline neededdialogue due to the story that is set out; so after theexplanation of story through the characters andtypography. The end is exciting and interesting andwould get the audience feeling eager to watch the movie.