James Vanderpant

Evaluation
In what way does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products ?
There are usually quite strict conventions you have to follow in film to enable your audience to fully understand the situation. Through our research we found that all though horror films may be different at first glance if we thought about the conventions with things like props, types of shots and sound we found that they were all quite similar. For our trailer we tried to follow most conventions so that the audience understood it. We found that in most horror film trailers we watched there was not many shots in daylight or bright light so we said that most of our shots would be filmed at night or in low light and i think this went well in the trailer because if most of our shots had been in the light then it would be difficult for it to be scary. Although we wanted our shots to be dark it was very hard to get the lighting right as it had to be light enough in order to see what was happening but not too light that it looked unnatural. Another big convention we noticed about film trailers was to do with captions and voice overs. At first we wanted to add a voice over to our trailer because we thought this would go well with what we wanted our trailer to feel like but as we researched into other trailers we realised that voice overs were mainly used for comedy films and most horror films used captions for their trailers , so because of this we decided to use captions instead and it worked well because we made the captions fit in with the theme of the whole promotional package. Other conventions we followed was that the editing at the start is quite slow and the music starts off with a piano solo that is a little bit scary and builds the tension for the turning point of the trailer which is about the middle where the music changes and a fast drum beat kicks in and then the editing goes from shot to shot a lot more rapidly creating a fast pace feel to the trailer. We did not have enough time to finish the trailer but if we did then we would of liked to of slowed the editing down a bit at the end and to make some of the shots fit more with the music. We did not really challenge many conventions because we though that we didn't really have the equipment or knowledge to make it understandable to the audience, we though that if we challenged the conventions too much it would make the trailer look of less quality so we though we would get a better looking product by sticking to most conventions.

Our film poster also follows quite a few of the conventions. First off in a film poster you have to let the audience know what the name is, when it comes out and who's in it. Our poster does all of these. i am pleased with our film poster overall because i think it promotes the film well. We knew the picture we wanted for our film poster, the silhouette of the main actor (murderer/killer) in a door way. We though this would be good because it does not give too much away about the film and creates a mysterious film but lets you know enough that it makes you want to see it. With though it was a good representation of our film because you cannot see any detail of the person which makes you question who he is and he is also standing in a doorway which you can clearly see he is not really supposed to be there which means he is intruding. We also followed conventions with the colour scheme of the whole poster. Blue is the main colour used through out our whole promotional package, we felt that the blue colour created and eary and mysterious feel that added to it all being scary.

The theme was also carried on to our magazine cover. We followed conventions quite strictly with the magazine cover because people have strict views on what they want from a magazine cover. Our original idea was a picture of his business card covered in blood because we though this was a good representation of the main characters professional side and also his psychotic side, but we then decided against it because it not look right, most magazine we researched had the main character as the picture on the magazine cover and not an object or prop.