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

Our teaser trailer is of the horror genre so we used many forms and conventions to help us clarify our chosen genre. One convention of horror genre is tense music, sometimes fast paced and including strings. We created this by finding a range of sound clips on the internet, downloading them and combining them on the program imovie to create one soundtrack, we also incorporated some diagetic sounds. We learned from our AS project that it is essential having the sound in sync with certain camera shots in order to make it more effective, as well as researching and analysing teaser trailers such as 28 days later and Don’t be afraid of the dark.

  

 One way we have challenged conventions of a horror teaser trailer is that we only used male characters as the victims, in contrast to females or a mix of genders. By doing this we made our trailer more unique than traditional horror teaser trailers. We also only have two victims in our teaser trailer compared to the convention of a group of victims. This is so that we do not give away too much of the plot, it is possible that more characters could be introduced in the movie, by doing this we intended to draw the audience in.

  

 We used the convention of having the killer wear a mask in order to clearly specify to the audience our genre. If the killer did not have a mask, our teaser trailer could have been mistaken for the thriller genre. We also used the mask to hide potential bad acting, as we used amateur actors, however the mask also creates a fear-provoking effect for the audience because it hides the killer’s face and therefore distances him emotionally from the audience. From looking at different weapons used in horror films and from a selection we had access to, we chose to settle on having the killer wield an axe, this weapon is easily accessible which is a convention of horror film weapons and it also needs strength to use properly, showing the strength of our killer.

Typography was an important part of production, as we learned from our AS project it helped define the genre and lets the audience know what to expect within a film, so we researched this. We used the convention of old, warn-out looking typography which is a convention of horror, and we applied this to our poster, teaser trailer and website. We found a website that provided free fonts to download (http://www.dafont.com/) and we decided to use fonts in typewriter style, this suited our asylum theme. However, we felt that the font we had chosen did not have enough of a 'rough' look to it, so we used photoshop to blur out some of the edges for our poster and changed the font white to contrast with the background, though unfortunately this was not possible to do for the typography on our website and teaser trailer.  

  
We developed the convention of having little spoken dialogue by having no spoken dialogue in our teaser trailer, in order to reveal less of the plot and avoid the problem of bad acting. Most of our shots were fast-paced and therefore did not have enough time for the characters to be speaking because they were running from the killer or disorientated.

  

 Another way we used conventions of the horror genre is that we used a typical location- an abandoned asylum. We chose this location because even filming there was unnerving, and therefore this should give a similar feeling to the audience when watching the trailer. We also chose this location to film at because there were no other people present so we could film uninterrupted. We also kept it in one location to use Aristotle’s unities theory: narrative should be created within a ‘unity’ of time, this means that the audience is less likely to become confused. 

We used the convention of disequilibrium in horror teaser trailers, such as The Strangers, by beginning our teaser trailer with slow paced shots and building to fast paced, with the music building tension. Our shots also began to get more violent and action-filled, however we subverted conventions for the ending of a horror trailer by having the last shot as quiet with no action, but high tension (close-up shot of a boy trying to quiet his breathing while hiding, behind him we see the killer's feet approach). This meant that as the audience see the title and release date at the end of the trailer, it is more memorable as they can only hear the ragged breathing of the boy. After this we give the audience one final scare with a bloody hand on a window, after the quiet scene this would scare the audience and entice them to see the film.

Overall, we used many different techniques to use and challenge conventions of the horror genre and our audience feedback shows that we were successful in showing our genre, however we made our teaser trailer unique through developing and challenging conventions.