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.