Evaluation - Question 1

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

When deciding on our initial plot for our horror trailer we decided we wanted to follow  Todorov's theory of narrative and the structuralist theory. When watching various horror trailers that were similar to what we wanted, like Prom Night, Scream and Texas Chainsaw Massacre, we soon came to realise that there were certain paradigms and codes and conventions that we had to follow in order to create the trailer that we wanted. These were an isolated setting, which would create fear and uncertainty within the audience, as it plays on peoples fear of the unknown. A knife and blood which is a classic form of killing your victim in horror films, but is also a more personal way of killing and it is available in every persons household, leading the audience to believe the killer is closer to their victim then they think. 

The final paradigm we used was a promiscuous blonde female, as this again is a trait you see throughout in real media products. This shows her as being helpless and unable to defend herself, which would then conform to the conventions of existing media products. However we went away from this and showed her trying to escape. We chose to dress the killer in black and hide his identity. And therefore followed the normal portrayal of how a killer would be. Which created an air mystery, which surrounded him throughout the trailer.

When we came to editing our trailer we made it continuous with a period of equilibrium at the begining that was easy to differentiate from the rest of the trailer. This was done through the fade in transitions through each scene.  We added tone cards to help with the flow of the narrative. We also put two tone cards at the end of the trailer showing the credits of all the people involved, we thought this helped to make it look proffessional. We also opted for putting a production logo at the start of the trailer to help with the professionalism and realism of the final outcome.

Overall through researching existing media products and theories, we were able to create a trailer that both used, but also challenged forms and conventions. This helped our target audience in identifying clearly with our trailer, as they are able to make the association to other horror films through the various paradigms we chose to follow.