Tuesday, 25 March 2014

Question 1: In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?


In this question we will be using evidence from our trailer to answer how we have used the conventions of our trailer and have used, developed or challenged it in our media product. We have decided to do this by print screening different scenes from our trailer that represented whether our media product had showed  the conventions of our genre. Below we have analysed 7 scenes that we believe shows the answer to question 1.




This is a shot from the beginning of our trailer which clearly  shows our target audience the location of our trailer and the characters. From this long shot we can see how our characters are portrayed as vulnerable by the use of the trees towering over them, making them look insignificant. It is clear from the backdrop and the ambient lighting we can tell that our characters are on a hill, symbolising the idea that they are on a journey and their journey is going to go downhill the deeper into the forest they go. In films such as Paranormal Activity and Blair Witch Project it is a typical convention for the characters to look into the camera and break down the 'fourth wall', this scene conforms to this convention as we have made our characters imitate the way that other actors directly address the audience.



The reason why we have chosen 'The Sun' as a review in this trailer is because their primary audience is working class men. Stereotypically thrillers often attract men more than women therefore we have successfully targeted men. The use of the word 'riveting' creates an impression of a compelling trailer and one filled with excitement and suspense. This therefore builds up the idea that this movie is everything that our target market would expect and want from a thriller, enough to intrigue and persuade them to watch this movie. During our research, we had looked into the different reviews of each genre allowing us to understand the vocabulary for it. For example; a romantic comedy trailer will have vocabulary such as 'love' 'romance' fun' whilst horror movie trailers have vocabulary such as 'frightening' 'scary' and 'unexpected' which fits into both conventions. When deciding what to put in the review we have decided to go with 'riveting' as our target market will understand it and it will bring the suspense that we want it too.





In this part of the trailer, we had we had wanted our Protagonist who’s character turns evil to have a direct gaze into the camera. We have broken away from the convention of the Protagonist being filmed by someone else into filming herself. The angle we have chosen to do so allow the target audience to have a close up view of the characters angst expression, in this case our character has adopted the feeling of fear and curiosity when going into the woods. This follows the conventions of most typical thrillers as the main character that is ‘chosen’ .


This is a middle shot of both our characters, in this case the Protagonist and the Antagonist. In this case we have challenged the conventions of most trailers where often the antagonist is often hidden to give the feeling of suspense and suspicion for our target market. The angle of this shot allow us to the both characters and the location they are in, the reason why we have decided to opt for a middle shot instead of the other various shot, was to get both characters and location in this scene. The background allows the audience to understand that in this location and in this scene the only people there are the characters giving a signifier that an 'accident' or a crucial scene is about to occur. Often in most trailers, the director would not like to give scenes like this away however we had decided as a group it would be best to do so for our target audience to be engaged.



This scene shows the title of the film 'Shady Woods', we had placed this scene write at the end developing the conventions of our media products, often the title of the during a thriller trailer comes before a crucial scene and then the billing block for example the 'blair witch project' has the title come up then the woman speaking into the camera 'I'm sorry to Jacks mum and dad, and everybody else, it's my fault that this has happened.' and then the billing block however for our trailer we have developed on this by having the trailer right at the end along with the audio of both our Protagonist and Antagonist screaming to create the mystery as to why and who is screaming. The text we chose for our title challenges the convention of the real media product, often the colour of real media product texts are often red but we have chosen to go with the white as it stands out from the black background. The title we had created 'shady woods' had been chosen from our target market after we gave them different possible options of what our title could be, after much consideration Shady Woods had been chosen as it does not give too much information away about the narrative for our trailer and movie.




Often along with the reviews, real media products have an award stamped onto the trailer representing how their movie have succeeded, we have used this convention as we believed it had been powerful when researching other trailers when it came up. We have applied this for our genre to persuade and bring in our target audience to watch this. This is the highest recognition a movie can get which is why we had wanted to put this in our trailer. Often known as the sun dance award but we had decided to go with the Audience Choice Award as it shows our target market that other people their age believe that this trailer is worth watching.




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