Evaluation - Question 1

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

After researching teaser trailers and observing the conventions in comparison to that of theatrical trailers, we decided which conventions we wanted to use and which conventions we wanted to challenge. In the existing teaser trailer that I observed some chose to use a voice over, whereas others didn't. For example, the teaser trailer for The Last Airbender included a voice over which helped explain narrative, whereas the teaser for A Nightmare on Elm Streetdidn't use a voice over at all, just a soundtrack. In our trailer we opted not to use a voice over as we didn't want to reveal too much of the narrative and we felt that it would not be as effective or necessary. This is because we feel the purpose of a teaser trailer is simply to tease and to get the title of the product 'out there' an hope that people begin to promote the product through word of mouth.
When observing existing trailers we thought about what the tease was in each one and we realised in the Nightmare on Elm Street trailer that the tease was that we didn't see Freddy Kruger's scared face. This makes the audience want to see his face even more and this is something we wanted to replicate in our trailer. For example when our protagonist/ the killer takes a note off the wall, we arranged the lighting so that we could not see his facial features. The only time we see a glimpse of the mask is when the camera rotates around the killer and so this is our tease and a convention we used from an existing trailer.

I feel that we adopted some technical conventions, such as the use of rapid shot which are often found in teaser trailer.  This doesn't give the audience a chance to understand narrative and allows us to withhold just enough information to keep the audience interested and willing to search for the film on the internet where they will come across our facebook and twitter accounts, so this links in the different media platforms well.  We decided to challenge generic conventions, for example we used specific shots like the 360 degree panning shot of the protagonist which celebrates and amplifies his power which hasn't been seen in other slasher horror films. 

For our Film Poster we decided to use a close-up much like the one in the Friday 13th teaser poster.  We felt that close-ups bring the audience closer to the audience and it allows for attention to detail.  We also made sure that the title was in large font. This doesn't strictly follow conventions of a teaser poster, as we see in the Friday 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street teaser poster where the main focus is on the character.  The reason we did not follow this convention is because the 2 films I mentioned are pre existing and well known which allows them to leave out the title and still be recognisable, whereas our film is new and so we needed to get the title 'out there' and expose it to the target audience.

I terms of our film magazine front cover, I feel that we followed the conventions in respect to the position of the title.  Our title is positioned in the largest font at the top of the page, much like the title for EMPIRE magazine and Fangoria magazine.  This gives the audience a clear indication of what the magazine is about and for regular readers it is easily recognisable.  One convention that we didn't follow was the use of freebies and competitions which is another method of intising the audience to purchase the magazine.  The reason we didn't do this is because we are a new release and we don't have the demands of a big magazine publisher such as EMPIRE.