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

Our Media productions follow many of the conventions of the thriller genre in regards to the three tasks set, a magazine front cover, a film poster and a trailer. Before we began the the production tasks our group separated to do in depth research into our specific genre of supernatural thriller. This involved taking trailers, magazine covers and posters and analyzing them in depth. This forced us to look at the forms and conventions of the productions.

The Conventions we used for our film poster are those that we felt best represented our film through the atmosphere and professionalism they created.

We did the same analysis and planning for our magazine front cover, taking conventions from different magazines to produce a piece with as high a level of professionalism as possible.

In the production of the Magazine cover and the Poster we mostly used the conventions as we felt that changing or developing them too much would damage the productions in how realistic they looked. However we felt we were more able to challenge and develop some of the conventions in the production of our trailer more, however whilst sticking to the main forms and conventions to keep the trailer looking like a real media product. Again we researched heavily into thriller trailers analysing them to pick out the forms and conventions commonly used to create a good thriller trailer.

The main conventions we had to stick to were the setting, the music, the editing, the lighting arrangements and the information shown. We first chose our setting of a holiday home commonly used in thrillers such as the last house on the left.

Next our music choices and positioning followed the conventions of a slow quiet start building into a fast louder track for the main action sequence and ending with a more mysterious edgy track for the end credits. This is a commonly used pattern in all thriller trailers.

The editing in thriller trailers conventionally has quick cuts in in the action sequences with and some fades in the slower more narrative section of the trailer, they also sometimes contain overlays for a spooky effect. We used these ideas in our trialer with small overlays, quick cuts in our action sequence and fades and cuts in our narrative section.

The lighting convetionally used in thrillers is low shadowy lighting, this creates a mysterious, frightening atmosphere. Becasue this is used in all thrillers we chose to follow this convention to make our trailer realistic in following real media productions.

The information shown in trailers is a convention hard to deviate from as this is key to selling the film, it needs to contain a release date, the title of the film and the prodcution company logo, block buster draws are also commonly thrown in as an extra selling point. We have used all of these information points along with other writing shots which include the films tagline, this will help the audience connect the films title whnever they hear the tagline. We also added a web address below the release date, this is seen in some trailer but not all, however we liked the idea and so decided to incorporate it in our trailer.

Another convention we used was in our synopsis for our film in which we followed the commonly used Todorovs Theory where the story begins with a state of equillibrium, then something disrupts the equilibrium, this is reognised and action is taken to restore it, and finally a different state of equilibrium is retored. Following this to create our synopsis allowed us to write a shotlist following many of the conventions used in real media trailers. Longachres theory also plays a part in our trailer production, we have started with a 'once upon a time' opening to our trailer, it then reaches an action 'climax', however this theroy states that it ends with a 'conclusion', however we changed this and left it out becasue our production is a trailer and so we dont want to reveal too much.

Through our research we also picked up other ideas to use in our trailer such as the found footage used in thrillers such as The Blair Witch Project and Paranomal Activity, both these films use this technique for the whole film, we only wanted to use this style for a small section of our trailer. We felt this helped us develop the conventional style of filming from a 3rd party view. The use of found footage allows the audience to feel like they are part of the action as it is as if you are there with the people as they are filming it them selves.

The attrativeness of the stars in the film is a common convention used in the film industry to promote a film. We followed this to some extent in that when choosing our cast we choose a group of pretty girls, however it is common in films like sorority row for the cast to be over sexualised by being dressed in short skirts and low cut tops, we chose to steer away from this aspect by dressing our girls in jeans and leggings, with hoodies and cardigans etc... we feel this helps the audience relate to the characters more as they are more realistic.

Most of our production followed the conventions of the genre we chose, this is becasue we based our productions on real media products and in order for it to look proffessional we had to follow the typical forms and conventions, however the little that we did challenge and develop I think helped us to create a professional looking yet origional production in all three areas.