Evaluation Question 1

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

In the research of my promotional package I looked at a trailer for ‘The Witch’ in order to understand the codes and conventions of my genre. Using my analysis of this I was able to use codes and conventions in our trailer to establish the genre. For my Poster and Magazine I analysed posters and magazines of ‘Jennifer’s Body’ and ‘Evil Dead.’

In the trailer we used a lot of dark shots over light shots, especially when the villain was involved in order to create tension and create a sense of claustrophobia like ‘The Witch’ does. We also used fake blood that we put on the main characters face similar to the Witch in order to better establish that something bad had happened. We were able to subvert from the trailer in that it, and a lot of other horror trailers, used long establishing shots that could build narrative but we used lots of fast rhythmic sequences to describe the story but also to convey the sense of panic of the main character to the audience. This helped us set up the growing instability of the characters mental state through the trailer which was a better way of telling story than using longer shots that may have been more boring for our audience as well as making the trailer less professional as there would be a bigger focus on how we filmed with basic equipment. In our camerawork we initially used a limited amount of shots, as seen in our rough draft. We then re-filmed and added in more extreme close-ups to build the claustrophobia as well as over the shoulder shots to help connect the link between the villain and protagonist for our audience. Also in development of the conventions of horror we made the creative decision to not explain what the villain was or what it was doing. In most trailers we can normally see the villain engaging in some of the behaviour in the movie in order to better explain part of the villains purpose to the audience. The decision to opt out of this left our villain even more unknown than is typical of horror as well as building on the descent of the main character as we can see the effect the villain is having on the character. The major way our trailer challenged forms and conventions and set our work apart from others was the artistic style of the trailer, which is untypical of the horror genre. This happened because we played to our strengths in music and art. I created the soundtrack for our trailer which included original work and a cover of twinkle twinkle little star that has been carefully arranged for a specific set of instruments to create a creepy and sinister effect.

My poster and magazine also followed codes and conventions of horror. For both I used a black background to make the image pop as well as to establish the genre like the magazine ‘Scream’ for Evil Dead. For my magazine as well I used convention in that I choose a name that was related to the horror genre which was ‘The Ghoulish’ This meant that when my audience would see only the masthead of the magazine on a magazine shelf they would know that it was a horror magazine and would be interested in it. For my poster I took three pictures of the protagonist, the villain and the protagonist during the breakdown of his mental state which I then layered on top of each other in order to create one image which challenged the conventions of my genre as typically the poster contains just an image of the villain but through merging all three images I was able to create uncertainty about the villain and create tension for my audience. I also had an extremely simple colour scheme of black, red and white in order to draw more attention what the image is about rather than how it looks which is also not typical of the horror genre.