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

forms and conventions of real media products?

Trailer

There are a number of ways in which our media products use, develop and challenge forms and conventions of real media products.

From looking at our influences we can see that there are a number of conventions that we borrowed from them, this includes camera angles, lighting mise-en-scene and sound.

However there are a number of ways in which we differed from them.

Orphan When trying to look at the

conventions of other horror/ thriller films we found that with the Orphan they had different close up shots of the main character, which focuses on her facial expressions.

Therefore we tried to re-create this same effect by having close ups of Mary, which show her as being threatening.

The Ring

When looking at The Ring we wanted to focus on how conventional horror/ thrillers create excitement and suspense in their trailers.

We found that there are many parts in the trailer that were fast paced and confusing, which gave the trailer an element of mystery and made you want to know more

Therefore we tried to use this convention in our trailer with the use of the quick cuts of words from the bible and the confusion of the spinning woods.

Hide and Seek The main idea that we drew from this trailer

was the sound that we used as we tried to make a connection between the song and the general storyline of the film much like they do in the Hide & Seek trailer as well as drawing on songs related to innocence to add to the genre of our film

Bloody Mary – we used the song of ‘Mary had a little lamb’, which is much like our storyline as Mary sees her friend as the lamb she must sacrifice.

Hide & Seek – the game of hide and seek is a direct link to the film and the speech at the end reinforces this

We also used some of the shot ideas from this trailer such as the door opening as we felt it was effective in creating suspense

We also used drew inspiration from the shot of a shrine as we felt the use of a candle created intense lighting as made the scene more dramatic

Bloody Mary

Bloody Mary

Hide & Seek

Hide & Seek

Challenging conventional trailers In our trailer we decided that it would be better not to use

any voice over's unlike our influences, as we felt that a voice over would make our trailer seem amateur and stereotypical of a trailer that uses general conventions. Also we felt that by having a voice over it would reduce the amount of tension and horror that we wanted to portray in our trailer.

Also we did not include any dialogue, as we wanted to entice our audience and leave the storyline up to their interpretation. We did this as our task was to produce a ‘teaser trailer’ and not a full trailer.

We decided not to ask our audience any rhetorical questions when watching our teaser trailer. This is unlike many other horror trailers. We challenged this convention as we felt that it was not necessary or relevant for our trailer. Also we did not want the trailer to be a cliché of other trailers.

Poster

When looking at influences for our poster we tried to look for how fear and horror was portrayed from an image.

We focused on how we could use the conventions of other film posters in order to make our poster look authentic

Therefore we used the similar layout for credits framing of the image.

Orphan We decided to adopt

the idea of having a single character on the poster and focused on the facial expression of Mary.

We also particularly liked the highlighting/ glow in the background of the image and when creating our poster we were able to re-create this effect from the lighting of the candle The colour scheme of

the text was something that we also felt was effective as white text stands out on a plain background and red is also very striking

Hide and Seek

We particularly liked the lighting in this poster especially the light shining from the doorway.

We also felt that the colour scheme was very threatening with the use of reds, black and white that stands out.

The Others

We really liked the idea of the candle being held as this creates bright lighting in contrast to the dark background and makes the characters facial expression more apparent.

We also felt that the style of writing eye catching but subtle at the same time, which compliments the lighting.

Bloody Mary - Poster

We used credits and age certificates as well as our film logo to comply with the conventions of real media posters

We also stated a date of the film as well as having a tagline to comply with the conventions of real media products

We borrowed the colour scheme similar to that of Hide and Seek as well as The Others as we wanted to conform to our influences

We also used similar text to that of The Others because we believed our poster appeared simple and not very artistic. Therefore we wanted to make the text more threatening and in accordance with our genre

We also used similar lighting to that of our influences as we wanted to make our poster to look captivating. Therefore we developed the idea of using low key lighting with the use of the candle similar to that of The Others and Hide and Seek.

We also focused on a single image of the character, highlighting facial expressions to make our poster menacing and striking, similar to that of Orphan.

Challenging conventional film posters

When looking at our influences we found that they generally had the title of the film at the bottom of the poster and because we felt that this didn’t suit the layout of our poster then we decided to put the title at the top, which is a way we challenged conventional posters

However overall we wanted to make our poster look as genuine as possible, therefore we tried to conform to the general elements of film posters

Magazine front cover

We looked mainly at Empire magazine front covers to gain a knowledge of their conventions and how we should construct our magazine cover

We were focusing particularly on what types of images they used as well as the type of layout and we tried to apply this to our magazine front cover

X-men edition

We felt that the single image of Wolverine on the cover was striking and is a conventional element to most magazine covers as the focus is usually of the one character.

We felt that the background was particularly interesting as it is not plain like most backgrounds, therefore this is an element we tied in with our magazine cover.

Avatar edition

We also felt that the sticker effect used is traditional to most magazine covers and gives it a 3D element.

We felt that the close up image of the character, focusing on their expression was very eye catching, therefore we felt that adhering to this convention would be beneficial in giving our magazine cover impact.

Iron Man edition

We felt that the way they this edition presents particular articles on the cover was ideal for the way we wanted to present our articles

The overlap of the characters head on the title was a common element that most of the Empire magazines

We felt that it was especially interesting that the Empire title had been modified to suit the theme of Iron man, therefore we wanted to create a similar effect

Bloody Mary – magazine cover We used the

conventional idea of a single image of a character and tried to focus on making the facial expression dramatic

We made the title Empire a little different from that of most editions as we wanted it to link to our theme of horror/ thriller

We used similar elements to that of most magazine covers by having a sticker like affect as well as different articles displayed in different ways similar to that of the iron man edition

We also used a busy background of the woods that ties in with our trailer similar to the background of the X-men edition, however not similar to that of most conventional front covers

Challenging conventional magazine covers In some ways we challenged conventional

magazine front covers by trying to be innovative with the use of a busy background that links with the setting of our film as well as editing the title of Empire to relate to our film genre.

However we feel that overall we tried to stick to the traditional elements of a magazine front cover to try and make it look as authentic as possible.

Conclusion

Throughout creating our media project (teaser trailer, magazine front cover and poster) we aimed to produce similar work to that of real media products, which is why we used and developed ideas form our influences.

However we did not want to make carbon copies of our influences, therefore we included some of our own original ideas and simply used our influences as inspiration. In this way we challenged the general conventions of real media products.