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.
