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

Trailer:
My film trailer contains many conventions of real horror film trailers, after researching and viewing many horror trailers I found that the most common conventions used are: 1. A relatively happy scene where most of the characters and the protagonist character are introduced. 2. Dark, secluded locations are used 3. The villain tends not to reveal their identity during the trailer and many villain wear dark costumes such as capes, gloves and masks ect. 4. As the trailer progresses the shots get faster and more action is shown. The beginning of our trailer uses the convention of a happy scene as we have a scene that shows all of our characters, apart from the gamekeeper, having a good time playing a game and chatting with each other. We decided to use a scene like this at the start of our trailer because many horror trailers contain scenes similar to this and also because the audience can get an in site to how the characters live their normal lives, they can relate to these characters because they get to see their personalities before any events, and have sympathy for them later on in the trailer. An example of a film trailer that uses this convention is Cabin In The Woods. This trailer opens with a bunch of friends leaving on a bus for a camping trip and theyre laughing and joking with each other, it then shows a shot of people watching them on cameras. Our trailer also shows a shot of the characters being watched, this is where the genre of horror starts to come into the trailers, after the happy scene.

(Happy scene example from Cabin In The Woods.)

(An example of CCTV from Cabin In The Woods)

(Happy scene example from our trailer.)

(An example of CCTV from our trailer)

In many trailers we looked at to get ideas for locations, very dark, secluded and scary places like graveyards, woods and cellars were used. So we decided to stick with this convention and use locations that are dark and secluded. We used a graveyard, woods and a cellar as our locations for the players to play the challenge they had been set as this would add the horror genre as woods are typically known to be scary in horror films and graveyards. They also added to the effect of our players being trapped in this game as they are very secluded locations and we also use a black room that no one can gain access to so Player 12 is trapped and no one can help her. An example of a trailer that uses a secluded location is Eden Lake its set in a disused quarry, they become trapped in this location as a bunch of teenagers want to murder them. Example of a location shot from our trailer

When analysing trailer to get ideas for our finished trailer, I noticed that many of the villain type character identity remain hidden by costume in the trailer; generally a black costume and they tend to be darker and scarier than any other character costumes. Sticking with this convention we decided our Villain, The Gameskeeper, would have a costume that consists of a black cape with jagged edges and a large hood that shields the Gameskeepers face as this would make that character appeal as the villain to the audience and also he will appear as a very mysterious character and with hiding his identity of his face no one will know who this character is and I believe this will build up the action and anticipation to the audience viewing our trailer as they will want to find out who this character really is. An example of a film that uses this convention is Scream 4. The villain character in this film wears a white ghost face mask and a black cape that hides his real identity.

(Example from Scream 4 of villain wearing a cape)

(Example of our villain wearing a cape, on our poster)

Another convention we saw that was used in many horror trailers was that as the trailer progresses the shots get faster and more action is shown in these shots. We decided to use this convention too, as our trailer begins its quite slow paced with establishing shots being used to introduce the characters but we then begin to use short, sharp action shots and they get faster the nearer to the end of our trailer. We did this because we feel that when the audience watch our trailer, because of how quick and short the shots are this builds up a sense of excitement as the audience will be drawn in to want to know what will happen, this will encourage people to watch the full length film. It also adds to the scary effect as it will flash black then show a gory shot, this could scare the audience as they wont know what will happen to the character after. This convention also builds up suspense, especially if you have placed the title at the end of the trailer like we did, as the audience viewing this will be eager to know what the title of the film is so they can watch it. An example of a film that uses this convention is Mama, this trailer uses short, fast action filled shots towards the end of the trailer like we have used. Link to Mama: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZlY47eCdas

One convention we develop in our trailer is, the use of text, most horror trailers show a form of text with a black background that will say something that relates back to the trailer or set the story of the film, where as we decided to use a voice over instead to do this. We decided to do this because the audience will still receive the same message as if we put it in text but they can continue watching whats happening whilst this information is being given to them also the voice over gave a scary effect as we decided to use a scary voice to read the text, because the films that we researched that did use a voice over, most of them had a scary, gruff voice reading them. Although we did use text to show what the production company is called.

(Example, Scream 4, of text being used during a trailer)

Links to all examples used: Cabin In The Woods: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJUIgf7lsCY Eden Lake: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6j3K4MmOKs

Scream 4: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5TsZ6iyaH4 Link to Mama: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZlY47eCdas

Poster (ancillary):
In order for us to achieve designing the best possible poster for our film, we researched different horror film posters and analysed what conventions they used and tried to portray them within the poster we designed for it to be the most effective towards our audience. I believe our poster contains the essential conventions of a horror poster to make it the most effective towards the audience that it can be.

Professional film poster conventions:

Tagline
Placed at the top of the poster and also coloured in a bright colour in contrast to the background to make it stand out. The tagline tends to be a short phrase.

Background
Simple, dark coloured background. Not showing too much so it becomes over filled and not using bright colours as dark colours represent it to be a dark film. Also the dark colour used makes it appeal scary.

Image One image used, as again this doesnt over crowd the poster with images as it meant to show that the film is within the horror genre. The image used tends to be scary and of a character from within the film and also tends to be placed at the center of the poster.

Credits Placed, in very small text, towards the bottom of the poster, this detail just gives the audience the names of people involved in the production of the film, again people might be familiar with their work.

Main actors name Above the title but smaller in size and again coloured in a bold colour to make it stand out, they have used the actors name as they might be well known which will make fans of their work want to view the film.

Release date Placed at the bottom of the poster and again is coloured in bright colour to stand out but is still smaller than the title but this is a relevant piece of information.

Title The title is in a bright colour compared to the background; this stands out to the audience. The title is placed at the bottom. In larger text than other texts on the posters.

Production company logos Placed at the bottom of the poster, very small in size as it isnt that important information but some viewers might want to know who produced the film as they might be fans of the companies work.

Our poster conventions:

Image Sticking with the convention of using one image we decided to use an image of one of our main characters. We did this as we felt this would be more effective, as we have used the image of the villain character, to give it a scary feel. We have placed the image at the center of the poster as we wanted this to be the main focus of the poster as this character is the main focus of the actual film. Also by not crowding the poster with different images it doesnt get to confusing for the audience.

Credits We placed the credits near the bottom of our poster and coloured them in a bright colour so they are readable on the poster. Again we didnt make the text very large as the credits are not as important as the title.

Background Sticking with the convention using one, simple bold and dark colour, we used a black background as we thought this would help the image to stand out whilst sticking with the dark theme of our genre.

Production company logos Again we kept the production company logos in the same position as the posters we analyzed, at the lower end of the poster. We didnt make the especially big as they arent a main feature but are there incase people want to know about the production companies.

Release date Like most horror poster we analyzed we decided to stick with placing the release date at the bottom in a bright colour so it stands out but made the text smaller than the actual title so the title text remains the main focus.

Title Instead of colouring the title in a bright colour like most examples we saw we decided to outline it with a bright colour, in comparison, to the background as we thought this would be a bold statement and make the title really stand out to the audience. We also made the text large and placed it at the bottom like most horror posters.

Website (ancillary): When creating our website, we used the internet to search for film websites that fitted with our genre of horror. When analysing the different websites, we noted down many of the conventions they used. Im going to annotate the conventions on the website for the film Sinister as this is the website we took the most inspiration from.
Social media buttons: The social media buttons are links to social media websites. They are placed at the top of the website an placed into a red box as this highlights them. The buttons are fairly small but still recognizable as they are pictures of the social media websites logos. Background: The background for the website is made up of images from the film; they are dark in colour as they are conveying with the tone of the film being a horror. The images used are of things typically related to horror films, for example blood.

Reviews: The reviews are placed at the top of the website, in a bright coloured text to stand out from the background; they arent as big as the film title in size but are placed in

Credits: These credits highlight what previous work the producer for this film has done, its placed just above the film title as it isnt as important but it shows the audience what previous work the producer/director has done in case they are fans of their work.

Title: The title is placed at the bottom of the website and is coloured in a bright white as this makes it stand out to the audience, its the largest piece of text on the website as it is the most important text as it tells the audience what the

films title is. The title is kept in the same font throughout all media products

Buttons: Buttons allow you to click them and they will take you to a feature page on the website. The buttons are placed at the top of the website as they are another main feature. They are quite large in size so they are visible to the audience.

Our website:
Menu buttons: Our menu buttons are a medium size and they appear like they have red blood scratches on them when you place the cursor over them as this highlight which button you have selected. We have colored them in a bright white as they will be highlighted against the black background.

Social media buttons: We have placed our social media buttons at the top, above the title; they are a different colour to the background so they stand out. They arent large in size but because of their colour they stand out. These buttons will allow viewers to communicate about the film on all different social media sites. This is important as social media is a huge part in society today.

Title: Sticking with conventions of other websites we analyzed we have kept the font on the website the same as our font for the title on our other products. The title is again the largest size text on our website as this is the most important piece of text on our website as this is the title which viewers will need to remember. The colour of the text is a bright white as this helps it stand out on the background.

Reviews : We decided to use reviews on our website as this will show the audience what professional film reviewers think of our product as this could sway audience to want to watch our film if it has good reviews. Again they are coloured in a bright white to stand out and placed at the side as it doesnt over crowd any of the background image.

Tagline: We havent used our tagline on any other of our media products but we decided to use it on the website as it just give the viewers of the website a little in sight to what the storyline is going to be about and also it looks fitting at the bottom of our website, again its coloured is a bright white to stand out to the audience.

Background/image: We decided to use a black background as our film is a horror and dark colours are associated with this genre. We have used just one image on our background of the gameskeeper as he is a main character and also the villain in our film and this makes the website appear scarier.

Live twitter feed: We decided to have a live twitter feed on our website, this will show viewers tweets when they use a hashtag. We thought this would be a good thing to use as it allows viewers to communicate directly with other people who have viewed the film and also because social media is a huge thing in society now and our target audience of teenagers use social media frequently.

How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts? I think the combination of my main product and ancillary texts are very effective. I think this because we put a lot of effort into researching what media products like ours were the most successful and then used the conventions they use and take inspiration from these products and interpret them into our own products. Firstly we found that most media products within the horror genre keep a link between the website and poster. We kept a link between our website and poster as we kept the same image and used it on both of these ancillary texts. We also found that the most effective way to get the audience interested in wanting to view the main media product is by not revealing too much information about the product on the ancillary texts, this encouraged us to keep the design of the poster and websites simple but effective, so we only put the title and a image of the main character on our ancillary products, as we felt this would intrigue audiences to want to watch our main product as they dont know the whole story. I think also by using just the image of the main two characters on the ancillary texts is effective towards the main media product as the audience will be familiar with these characters. When we researched horror trailers we noticed that most of them show only very quick shots of what happens in the film so we decided that this would be more effective for us to do, as again not too much about the product is being revealed, as this would form a bond with the ancillary texts as they do the same thing as each other by keeping the content of the trailer being shown to a minimal but all reveal different things from our main media product. The colour scheme is also kept the same throughout the ancillary texts: black, white and red, I think this keeps to the convention of horrors being dark. The colour scheme shows that the trailer is going to be dark and because our trailer is dark, this has kept the convention, of it being dark, throughout all 3 products so they are relatable and the audience will see this. We created the all the media products with the intention of them to promote the film and I think they do this very effectively as they all stick to the main conventions used on professional products and they dont differ to much from each other so they are all relatable to the actual film.

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Feedback: We handed out a questionnaire to 60 people who were going to view our media products. We ask them an array of questions so that we could receive feedback on every aspect of our products so we could take these results and note how we could improve to make our even better, next time we come to making media products again. Overall the majority of the audience feedback we received was positive and good comments were left. Only a small minority didnt think we done an effective job but overall the good comments were higher in numbers than the bad. 1. Can you identify what the genre of the trailer is? 60/60 said yes they could identify the genre as a horror/thriller.

2. Do you think the trailer contains features of a normal horror? E.g. scary locations, costume, props, music e.c.t 54/60 said yes. Some of the comments viewers left said that using dark and scary locations such as the graveyards were relevant to this. 6/60 said no. the comments they left said that we didnt use any dialogue like horrors do and gave away too much information in our trailer. 3. How effective do you think the music is? In relation to the trailer. 54/60 said it was effective but the majority of the 54 people noted it was very effective. Some of the comments viewers left said the music built up tension, added suspense, was scary, gave the trailer a tense atmosphere and it worked well with the footage being shown. 6/60 said it wasnt effective. These viewers felt that the music wasnt scary enough, it didnt build up much tension and that the music was the same throughout. 4. How did the music make you feel whilst watching the trailer? 57/60 viewers left good comments. Some of the viewers left comments that said it made them feel, uncomfortable, scared, tense, anxious, intrigued, engrossed, apprehensive and cautious of what was going to happen next. One viewer said they were eager to know what was going to happen next. 3/60 viewers left negative comments. 2/3 said it didnt scare them and the one viewer said they lost interest. 5. Do you think the music built up tension?

56/60 said yes, they thought the music built up tension. Some comments of the positive feedback these viewers left said the music you wary of what was going to happen next, that the music create a sudden change of tone and it set a dark atmosphere. 6. Did you find the voice over effective? Was it clear? Did you find it creepy? 53/60 viewers said yes 7/60 viewers said no 7. Did you find the costumes of the teen characters effective? 56/60 viewers said yes 4/60 viewers said no 8. Do you think the characters being teenagers is better than having older characters? Can you relate to these characters? 59/60 viewers said yes 1/60 viewers said no 9. Do you think using a female as the main character makes the film more interesting? 52/60 viewers said yes 8/60 viewers said no 10. Do you think the locations add to the effect of the film being a horror? 60/60 viewers said yes 11. Do you find the locations scary? 57/60 viewers said yes 3/60 viewers said no 12. Do you think that speeding up the clips towards the end of the trailer created suspense/ 54/60 viewers said yes 6/60 viewers said no

13. Do you think that the trailer gives you enough information about the film, in order for you to want to watch the final film? 52/60 viewers said yes 8/60 viewers said no 14. Do you think the storyline is a good storyline to use for a horror film? 58/60 viewers said yes 2/60 viewers said no For the final question we asked, do you have suggestions for improvement?, some of the feedback we got back from this question is that we need to add more action into the trailer and more scary shots also that we need to add in sound effects as well as more information about the actual game.

How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages? When my group and I decided that we would like to create a horror trailer, we used websites such as Google, Google images and YouTube to research and plan for our media products. By using YouTube we could look at professional horror trailers and analyse what conventions they used so we could take ideas and interpret them to use in our final trailer also YouTube help us with the overall construction of our trailer as we watched tutorials on how to use media technologies such as After Effects so we would have further knowledge on how to use this program. We used Google as this allowed us to research the meaning of words so we could decide on our film title as we wanted it to have a subliminal meaning also because Google is a search engine we could use this to search for film websites so we could research and analyse them so we could use conventions they have used and use them on our final ancillary project. Google Images allowed us to research different film posters as we could view these posters and again see what conventions they used and how we could adapt on these conventions to use on our final poster. We used a website called www.surveymonkey.com to put out a survey to an audience and ask them questions on what they would prefer to see in our trailer. We could collect the results from this survey to use in

our main media product so our trailer would be best suited towards our target audience. When constructing our media products we had to use a variety of different media technologies: IMac: We used the IMac as this had the best programs installed on it that we could use to create the best media products we could. We used a program called FinalCut: Express to edit our main media product as we felt this had the best suited video transitions for the editing stage of the main product also this was closes program to what professional filmmakers use and Finalcut allows you to layer different footage so its eaiser to edit whereas a program like IMovie only allowed us to drag and drop the footage and it all showed up on one consecutive timeline, Finalcut allows you to have many more timelines. We also used another program installed on the IMac called After Effects to create a visual effect that would show text that would tell the audience the name of the production team that produced the trailer, After Effects was the best program to use for this as this has a wide range of preset effects that are simple and easy to use. To create the first ancillary product, poster, we used a program called Adobe Photoshop as this was easier for us to create the poster as this program allowed us to create layers and upload the text, image, background and edit the lighting on separate layers. This made it easier for use to edit as we could edit a layer without it affecting any other layers, for example we could edit the lighting on the image we had chosen but this change wouldnt affect the background layer. Photoshop also made it easier for use to add the title text Player 12 as the text appear with no background so the text goes straight onto the natural background we had selected to use. Adobe Photoshop also has a tool called Background eraser which allows you to erase the background, we had a green screen background, without it erasing the actually image you want to keep because of the difference in colour, this is also why we used a green screen when capturing our images on a still camera as it made it easier for us. For the second ancillary product we used a program called Dreamweaver to create the website as this program had the better tools than Adobe Fireworks as we wanted to create a live twitter feed so that viewers who have viewed our trailer could tweet their opinions of it and the tweet would appear on the website in the live twitter feed. Also when creating the website we did use Fireworks to create the buttons for the website, we wanted the buttons to appear like they had blood scratches on them when the cursor was moved over them, this was the best program to use as we could create the layers separately then blend them together and upload it onto Dreamweaver easily. Camera: To capture the footage for our trailer we used an Hd camera as we felt this would give us the highest quality of picture as we could

get. The HD cameras were also the easiest to use to upload the footage onto the IMac because we could upload the footage straight on FinalCut: Express, this was quicker than uploading the footage onto another program then importing it to FinalCut. To capture the images we wanted to use on the website and poster we used a Fujifilm Finepix camera as this was the highest of quality camera we could use and this was also simple to upload the photos onto Photoshop and we could just insert the cameras memory card into the IMac and upload the images. Internet: For the font we used for the film title we made a sketch of what we wanted it to look like then searched through all of the font used on Microsoft Word to find the closest one that matched our sketch but for the font we used for the buttons on the website we used a website called www.Dafont.com, a free from copyright website, to find the font we wanted. Taking inspiration from a film called Sinister we decided we wanted the font to look like a child had handwritten it so we search the word Handwritten and found a font called Skinny that we wanted to use. To get the font put on the IMac it was a long process as we had to ask for the college I.T technicians to upload the font on for us.

(Sinister font)

(Our font)

We also had to use the internet to search for a copyright free music website so we could get sound for our trailer. We used a IPhone to record the sound of a saw cutting wood, we asked the colleges design and technology department if we could record them. It was easy to upload the sound file onto the IMac as they are both Apple products and we could use Itunes to export the sound filme and import it to FinalCut. Also the internet allowed us to keep a blog of everything we had done, this was important as we had to use our blogs to keep documented text of all the work we have done for evidence of coursework, also the blogs allowed us to keep a note of what we had done so if we needed to go back and check how we did something we could. Lighting: The lighting that we used played a key role in our media products as it had to give off the right effect for the genre we choose. When filming for our main media product, because we filmed in a dark room, we wanted to use spotlights as we knew we could control the brightness of the lights and what lights came on and what lights didnt with the use of the sliders on the control board for the spotlights, the

drama faculty allowed used to use their room to film in as its dark and has spotlights in. We also used just one portable spotlight when taking the photos for the ancillary products as again we took these photos in a dark room and we could control what direction the light shone from.