Evaluation Question 1

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

From the beginning of our trailer, we made it very clear that all is not right in the world of the film; we kick off with our setting, a long winding road that seems to be in the middle of nowhere, leading to a large eerie house, we make sure that, we use the right filter on the lens to let through the correct amount of light, following the conventions of an ordinary horror trailer, making it light when everything is okay, and dark when everything is going wrong. We use a couple of different shots of the house to show how big and old it is, you often see this in horror trailers, it is almost conventional that there is such a big location that the many victims of a killer can get lost in so many different places. The setting of any film is one of the most fundamental parts, if we had set our trailer in Disneyland with the same narrative, it would have a very different feel to it. We used different sound effects accompanied with a soundtrack to emphasise certain parts of the trailer, and to add effect, in the screenshot below of our trailer, we used a rushing

sound when panning the camera round to him to emphasise that he was the killer, we also had the camera looking up at him, and down at our other two characters getting out of the car, to show his dominance over them, making him the more powerful out of the trio. Making the killer look powerful in the trailer is essential, as you don't want to know that the main characters are going to win, it takes some of the fun out of it.

We used only a couple of shots containing blood, gore and torture in the trailer to leave the audience of it satisfied, yet wanting more, enticing them to come and watch the film to see what it has to offer.

As in any film trailer out there, the intertitles and overlays are essential to getting a real professional feel, and to make the trailer better, we used them to give the trailer more of a narrative, but also to jump forward, be it only a small bit, but they can be used to jump massive time gaps as seen any other trailers, but I believe we used them appropriately. I also believe we met the convention of any genre of trailer, by showing the production company logos at the beginning of the trailer, it gives the audience a chance to guess what they are in for, as they may have seen a film before made by the same company, and know their style of shooting, the way the use special effects, or just how good they are in general. We also used these at the end along with the end titles and release date, to reiterate their importance. The release date and end title are arguably the most important part of the trailer, as it is the last thing that the audience will see, so it has to stick in their minds, they will know the name of the film, when it's coming out and who is making it.

We could not include any special effects in our trailer, as it was so low budget, but we did the best we could with camera angles and different props, my favourite being the killers choice of weapon, its a classic in the genre, a large knife, mainly seen in such blockbusters as scream, in which the masked villain yields the weapon, testing peoples knowledge. We included Carol Clover's theory of the final girl, the one who has slight masculine traits and will always survive, but the audience will not know this. I believe that our trailer meets many, if not all conventions of horror that we chose to include, our narrative structure does not differ from what you see out available at the minute, and we tried to follow everything to the letter.