Evaluation question 1

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

My media products conform to the conventions of the horror genre through the use of paradigms and typical elements seen in horror film trailers and on posters for the film etc.

My main film inspiration when creating my trailer was Paranormal activity. I incorporated methods used in this trailer when creating my own, for example, in terms of cinematography, the 'hand held' camera effect I used at the end of my trailer creates the illusion that the character being focused on has set up the camera and is filming herself in order to catch the protagonist on film. This method is used almost all the way through the paranormal activity films and I think is great for creating the illusion that the footage is real and has been filmed by everyday people living their lives. This makes the film considerably more scary for the audience as, while watching it, they start to wonder if it really is something that happened and not just an act.



I also studied the variety of posters that were released for the paranormal activity films when creating my poster, along with multiple other horror film posters. What I noticed the most was the darkness of the posters. Almost every one used little colour, usually only grey, black, white (mainly for titles in order to make the stand out against the background) and red. I decided to conform to this convention for my poster.



Another paradigm I followed was my choice of setting. I set my trailer in my house which is Victorian and therefore conforms to the common setting of a horror film, and especially a supernatural one, as a lot of them are filmed in old houses that some people could believe to be haunted. 

By only using one character throughout the majority of my trailer and using little to no narrative I feel that I did challenge one convention of horror films as after studying a variety of horror film trailers I found that little to none had only one main character. However, I have also conformed to the conventions of horror trailers by making my main character (and victim) a girl. This is typical for a horror film as females are often seen as the most vulnerable type of characters.

My trailer follows a linear narrative and this does conform with real horror trailers. It begins with an equilibrium, followed by the first moment of a disequilibrium, short clips of a further disequilibrium with intertitles slotted in between to build suspence, and finally the title page.

FINAL TRAILER

Trailer production

To create my trailer I used three different types of software on a Mac computer. These were Final Cut express, which I used to edit and finalise my trailer, Adobe after effects, which I used to create authentic looking intertitles, and finally, I used photoshop to create my production company logos which are shown at the start of my trailer.

Having used Final cut express last year in film studies, I had a relatively wide range of knowledge on the software.

FINAL MAGAZINE

Magazine production

FINAL POSTER

Poster production

I started creating my poster by opening a new document in photoshop and drawing a black square over the page to create my background colour. I chose the colour black because I am studying the genre horror and I saw this as a fitting colour for such a 'dark' theme. Also, black is the easist colour to work with if you want to use other colours as well, there isn't a colour that doesn't go with black.

 

The next step I took in creating my poster was taking a screenshot from my trailer that I thought would suit a poster, and editing this image to make it fit the creepy theme I was going for. I edited the image using the filter galery in photoshop, after experimenting with a few different effects I decided on 'halftone pattern'.

  

I then added my chosen title to the document using the font 'corier new'. I immediatly liked this font for my poster, however I felt it should stand out more. This prompted me to experiment with a few effects and colours.

 I eventually added an 'outer glow' and fiddled around with the settings until I felt it suitable for my poster. I think adding the red gave the title a much more sinister look as red is often associated with blood and this fits in well with my genre, horror. I also added an 'inner shadow' in an attempt to blend the red glow into the letters more so that they weren't as bright white. I managed to achieve my desired look eventually by changing some of the settings around.

I then decided that the film title should have a tagline, and the question 'Who would you open the door to?' suited the title and my chosen image perfectly. Because this is only a tagline, I didn't feel it necessary for it to stand out as much as the title, however I did make it the same font.

Next I went onto dafont.com and downloaded the suggested font for the credits. Once I had done this it was relatively easy to come up with enough names for the different credits, and I got a good idea of where and how big they should be from looking at example posters.

Every film has an age rating and this must be shown on most, if not all, advertisements for the film in order to make it clear how old you must be to view it. Therefor next I went onto the British board of Film Classification website and found the symbol for the rating '18' as I think this is the suitable age rating for my film.

I then had to edit the symbol to get rid of the white background. To do this I copied and pasted the symbol into a new photoshop document and used the polygonal lasso tool to cut around the edges of the symbol. I then dragged it back onto my poster and positioned it where I thought it looked best. I also used 'free transform' to change the size as it looked slightly too big when I first added it to the poster.

I then added a date for the film to be released, and decided to make this the same day as halloween as my film is a horror and a lot of people enjoy going to watch a scary film on halloween. I also added a fake website for my film to make my poster even more realistic. Originally I used the website 'www.noescape.co.uk/dontopenthedoor', however after looking at some other examples of film posters, I realised that this was probably too complicated and changed it to 'www.noescapefilm.co.uk'.

At the beginning of my trailer the production company I made up is presented. It is called 'dollhouse productions', there is then a presentation of my other made up company called 'real cinema'. I have added these to the bottom of my poster.

Finally, I added some supposed magazine reviews of the film to the top of my poster with a five star rating from the magazine I have created as part of my promotional package. I didn't think there was enough colour in my poster and this prompted me to put the names of the magazines in red. To create the authentic five star rating, I went back onto 'dafont.com' and downloaded the font 'star things'. This font has a variety of different stars so I tried each of them and chose the one I found most appropriate and professional looking.