Evaluation 1

Evaluation 1 

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

When we created our trailer we initially set out to a conventional horror trailer in every sense of the word. We looked at previous horror films/ trailers such as the blare which project, scream house of wax and a few others. We looked at these films trailers and tried to understand what was traditionally in a horror trailer and what codes and conventions we had to follow. One big convention we tried to follow was starting the trailer off at a slower pace and gradually increasing the pace until the big finale or “Killer Shot”. For example the shot showing the “others” at the end of the house of wax trailer when developing the trailer always tried to keep this in mind. While in practise we didn’t get this exactly right we tried to follow the premise of this convention of horror trailer. Another convention we were interested in from the get go was the concept of a clear “Final Girl” in the trailer for house of wax(2005). We decided to challenge this conventions in ways while there hints of a final girl in the trailer there is no clear one so therefore challenging this convention

 Another convention we were aware of was the idea that the “monster” or antagonist is heard and saw throughout the trailer but no showing the full image of him/her/it until the very final moments of the trailer.

We also tried to use horror conventions that have been used for almost a decade. An example of this would be using certain shots for example, close ups to be able to see the characters facial expressions which shows their emotion and provokes an emotional response in the audience. An example of this would be the famous physco in the shower seen where normal bates attacks the protagonist in the shower. Another example of a traditional horror shot we used was the P.O.V shot which is very common in modern day horror films such as paranormal activity.

One convention we felt was vital to follow was length of the trailer as we felt that if it is to short then it would be hard to get people interested in it and if it was too long people would become bored and not interested on our trailer. We looked other horror trailers and found at that the average time for a horror trailer is between the 1:10 to 1:50 so made sure that our trailer followed this convention and it was in between those two times in terms of length.

Overall I feel we didn’t try to challenge the codes and conventions in many respects and tried to stick the a the codes and conventions of a traditional horror film the best we could. I felt that we achieved just that as most of the codes and conventions we decided use is shown our trailer in one way or another.