How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

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

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

Our media product uses, develops and challenges forms and conventions of real media products in many different ways.
A common convention of a horror trailer is to have intertitles throughout the trailer, giving the audience written information about what is going on, in order to give them an overview. These may be shown through; ‘words of warning’ about the film, quotes, or as seen towards the end of a typical trailer, the name of the film or the date that it will be released.

 Our media product has most of these typical conventions. It has a ‘green screen’ at the start of the trailer, and the production company (for our horror trailer we chose to use Liongate production). Adding to this, we have used quotes from a bible in this instance, which also follows typical codes and conventions of a religious horror trailer, which is the sub-genre of horror that we tried to make our trailer to be. As a group, we believed that the bible quotes gave the trailer a creepier, more haunting feel to it, due to the insecurity about religion in modern society, which may cause fear throughout the public. Finally, towards the end of our trailer, we have followed typical codes and conventions of a horror trailer by including our title ‘.Com’, and the date in which our film comes out (13/1/13) through intertitles. In typical horror trailers, intertitles are used to help to build suspense and tension, and to give the audience a sense of fear, the unknown.

A common concept of the horror genre is that there is a fearless, scary killer, hiding in the shadows and darkness and wearing dark clothes, in order to keep mysteriousness to the character, causing more fear throughout the film. This is typical in ‘Scream’, where the killer dresses in a cloak and kills most of his victims at night. We have followed this convention, but dressing our killer in dark clothes, and a hood covering his face. However, we challenge the codes and conventions of a typical horror trailer as most of our killings are in the day rather than the night. We did this to try and show that the killer is just an average person, suggesting that anyone could suddenly turn into a psycho killer, which we hoped would spread fear amongst those watching the trailer. We showed that our killer has power by the church scene, where we have a slight low angle shot looking up at the killer. This adds to the codes and conventions of a typical horror trailer of low angle shots, which shows power. Our trailer possesses this low angle shot, which follows the typical codes and conventions of a horror trailer. (as shown in the screenshot from our trailer below).

Another common convention of a horror film is extreme close ups, which are used a lot. These are used as a way of invading the audience’s personal space, causing fear thoughout the audience. Our horror trailer used a few extreme close ups, such as in the church scene where it zooms into the killer’s face. We wanted to incoporate this close up into our trailer as it shows the audience the lack of emotion in the killer's face, which would hopefully spread fear.

My horror film would probably be an 18 certificate, due to the amount of blood and gore involved. As the film is a slasher horror, and similar to ‘Scream’, it would also add reason to probably certificate the film as an 18. Another reason for the film to be certificated as an 18 would be because it is based around religion. As religion tends to be an eerier sub-genre of horror, it would be inapprpriate for anyone under the age of 18 to watch it. Although certificating it as an 18 would lose some of our target audience, if we were to make it less gory and more suitable for a 15, the film wouldn't be as good, and so would lose us profit in the long run.

One code and convention in which we followed is the scense consisting of scary, desrted, haunted environments (such as the mental asylum in 'Wrong Turn', which is deserted). We chose to film a graveyard scene in the production of the '.Com' trailer. The fact that it was winter when we filmed the trailer helped us as the bare trees gives a more sinister look to the scene. This scene gives the trailer as a whole, a more frightening feel to it (as shown in the picture below)

 

A lot of horror films have a specific scene (usually deserted), used for when the killers does killings, such as a forest, or alleyway. Our trailer has followed this code and convention of a typical horror trailer by including a beach/sand dunes scene within it. This adds realism to our trailer, as it shows an environment used by the public, again showing the audience that the killer is just a regular member of the public, as are the viewers of the trailer. This will hopefully create fear throughout those watching the trailer, which is what the main aim of any horror trailer is.
 

In conclusion, we have tried to follow typical conventions of a horror trailer in the best way possible, in order to try and make our own trailer look more professional, and less like an amateur college production.

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

Our trailer was played in front of the whole class (consisting of students aged 17-19). This age group was helpful as they were the target audience for our horror trailer. This meant that the feedback we were given was even more useful when making last minute changes to our trailer in order to improve it. We got both positive and negative feedback. The feedback we received was compared to actual horror trailers, and how much we followed the typical codes and conventions of a horror trailer. Screening our trailer in class allowed us to not only receive written feedback, but also visual feedback as we were able to experience the class’ reaction to our trailer.

In an actual horror movie production, feedback is very important for the distribution of the film, as it helps the producers to decide what to keep and what to cut out of the trailer, as well as any improvements that could be made.

We had feedback on many different aspects of our trailer, one of which was sound. People tended to like the opening music to our trailer, but were puzzled as to why there was baby’s laughter later on. Due to the amount of responses that disliked the baby’s laughter, as a group we decided to take it out of our trailer. In general, the responses we received show that the majority of people enjoyed the build-up of sound to a crescendo in the final few seconds of our trailer. I believe that the ticking clock sound worked well, which was shown by the positive feedback we received from it. It followed a typical conventional sound in a horror trailer of a ticking, almost heartbeat-like sound.

A point in the trailer which everyone seemed to enjoy was the final shot of someone hanging, and the build-up of music that went with it. I think people tended to like that part because it was unexpected, and everyone had thought that the trailer was over. By adding this to the end of our trailer, we have followed another typical convention of a horror film by giving our trailer a shock and surprise ending to try and make our audience jump. This would eventually hopefully help them to remember our trailer and so want to see the cinema release of it.

The feedback we received in terms of editing had both good points and bad points. In general, people liked the lengths of our individual clips, except for the montage, which was seen as being too long and having too many similar clips in it. We couldn’t change this a great deal as there was not enough time to go and shoot some more footage. However, we spliced some other clips into our montage, making it more fast-paced, another typical convention of a horror trailer. This will help to raise the adrenaline of our audience when watching the trailer.

The feedback we received was very helpful, due to the number of improvements that we made to our trailer due to it. This has hopefully allowed us to achieve a higher grade for our project. As a group, we carefully looked at the criticisms of our trailer and made changes accordingly. We found that some of the sound didn’t work, and our montage didn’t fit the codes and conventions of a montage in a typical horror trailer.

In conclusion, our feedback from the class allowed us to create, what we think is, and much better and higher quality horror trailer.