Trailer Analysis

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

In our trailer we had to follow the conventions of a typical horror trailers in order to clearly present the genre. We aimed to create a slasher trailer, to convey this genre correctly we used conventions such as the sound and how it can influence the tension and sense of fear in our trailer. When we considered sound we had to think carefully how we could make it effective and how we could create stigma and change the equilibrium throughout the movement of our trailer. For example when editing sound into our footage we had to careful think how we could successfully create a sense of fear and tension, this lead us to using a very sharp and quite chilling sound nearer to the end of our trailer. When adding this sound to our trailer we made it so it became more rapid and fast pass nearing to the end of our trailer, by doing this we had hoped to achieve a sense of enigma and to speed up the viewer’s imagination and curiosity of our trailer, to make them think what might happen next? As a group we decided we wanted to create a slasher trailer this is why we had to be very considerate as to how we captured our audience’s attention. Because of our decision we had to look more into our genre in order to fully understand it, for example the slasher movie A Chainsaw Massacre is a very good example of the conventions we wanted to convey throughout our trailer. From looking at A Chainsaw Massacre we were able to see how we as a group could create equilibrium to disequilibrium, for example our setting was placed mainly in a woods. The reason we placed most of our scenes in the woods was to create the sense of isolation with nowhere to go, to create a ire atmosphere and to put the audience on unsteady grounds. When we began our filming we made it so that our victim was in a open field with nothing surrounding her, we did this to create a sense of equilibrium at the beginning of our trailer, to make our audience feel calm and to make it appear as if nothing bad could happen. By putting our Vitim in a open space it creates a form of safety because she is able to see at all angles and get away if trouble came along. This sense of equilibrium is similar to that of A Chainsaw Massacre, for example in Chainsaw Massacre a similar form of equilibrium is create at the beginning of the trailer, making it seem as if the victims are safe from danger, but as the trailer goes on this equilibrium changes into disequilibrium, for example the car in the trailer breaks down and they are stranded in the middle of nowhere. When looking at our trailer you can see we too have attempted to create a form of disequilibrium in a similar way to Chainsaw Massacre. In our trailer we made it so our victim slowly gets lost into the woods and is left with nowhere to go and lost. By doing this we have tried to create a sense our victim is being watched and is slowly falling into the hands of danger. When making our trailer we tried filming on days where the lighting was dull making the atmosphere and surrounding seem bleak and giving our trailer a uncountable feeling about it. By using different conventions in our trailer we are creating a element of fear, our aim is to make the audience fear what they might see next and to draw them in and make them want to see more.

We had to consider how we would portray our victim who in herself is too a major convention in horror movies and trailers. To follow the convention we had to make her appear weak and small but still give her sense of intelligence. For example in our trailer we dressed our victim in smart clothing with a posh looking coat and bag, by doing this we have already made her appear as if she is well off and quite wealthy. This in turn leads to an appearance of intelligence. When filming our victim we wanted to make her seem as if she was small, weak and scared, this is common in all horror trailers

depending on the character being portrayed, for example in our trailer the main victim is aimed to be a intelligent young girl who just happens to walk into the wrong situation. To make our victim appear weak and defenceless we had to consider what type of shots we wanted to use in our trailer, for example to make our victim seem weak we had to take shots such as above shots, by doing this it makes her appear as if she is small up against her surroundings and looked over. Our victim needed to look as if she was weak, to create this we considered her meise-un-scene and the way she appeared, for example our victim is wearing glasses, by her wearing glasses we have created an innocent appearance, this is because glasses are very much looked upon as something young geeky people would wear, this makes it seem as if she is a hard working overly protected young girl. By giving her glasses it makes it a lot clearer to the audience that she is aimed to be a fragile and innocent character in the trailer and movie.

To create a successful slasher movie trailer we also had to consider the main aspect of a typical horror genre, which of course was the villain. In contrast to the victim the villain had to appear more threatening and strong, to create this effect me and my group again had to consider the different aspects of appearance and other technical appliances we needed to use to portray this. To make our villain appear a dark and threatening figure in our trailer, we had to focus on the costume, for example looking back on our trailer we decided that dressing our villain in a big bushy coat, with a white hockey mask would make our villain seem anonymous, odd, threatening and evil. By using a mask we were able to conceal the identity of our villain making him seem more hidden. By using a mask we also created a question for our audience, this question was “what or who is behind the mask, and will we ever see them?” we wanted to create stigma towards this character, giving our audience something to anticipate. By creating this kind of anticipation we have drawn in our audience and made then want to see if they were right, resulting to them watching both our trailer and film. We wanted our villain to wear a big bushy coat due to the fact is conceals our character and makes him seem darker, more hidden. We basically wanted to make it appear as if our character is trying to appear anonymous, this is more threatening due to the fact this kind of concealment means our victim can’t identify their killer resulting to more fear of their villains appearance. It was difficult making our villain follow the conventions of a typical Slasher trailer, this was due to the gender and appearance of our actress. When filming we had to use a female actor because we were unable to access any male actors, we had to be very considerate due to this. For example we wanted to follow the general conventions for a slasher trailer like A Chainsaw Massacre for example, where the Villain is a strong appearing male who has a threatening appearance, to assure we could create this in our own trailer we had to make the build of our actress appear larger and bulkier to resemble a males body, we had to make sure we could hide any evidence of our actress to be female to allow a successful outcome for our villain. We also had to consider camera angles for our villain, for example we used higher angles on our victim to make her appear weak and insignificant, but we had to use the contrasting angle for our villain, for example lower angles to make him appear taller and more significant, by making him appear taller we have created a looking over effect on our victim maker her seem small up against our villain, looked down upon, this in result makes her seem helpless toward our villain who appears threatening. There is also the factor of alpha male, by making our villain seem stronger and our victim seem helpless, we are portraying the typical view across society that the male is stronger and in charge, where as the female should stay obedient to the male. This type of characteristic is generally presented in slasher films, but most try to make twists making the victim stronger then the villain, resulting to more enigma.

What did I learn from audience feedback?

When making our trailer we made it using a range of stages. Throughout these stages we would ask a group of people to come along and analyse what they thought of our progression as we went on with our trailer, we asked them to tell us what they thought was good so far and what was needed to be changed in order for the trailer to become successful. When we first presented our trailer to an audience to see we were given helpful feedback, for example we were told that our progression to begin with was at an ok position but we needed to show our conventions more clearly and chain our footage so it was not so messy and made more sense. As a group we took this information in and changed what was needed to be changed. We began by trying to link our footage together so that the story of the trailer was a lot clearer to understand. As we did this we noticed gapes in our footage and took this into consideration, this was what pushed us to develop on our film and create more scenes. When we looked at some of our feedback we noticed that the audience we showed it too wanted us to make it clearer what the story line was, this was another reason we continued to film extra scenes to our trailer, we decided we had to capture more action throughout our trailer making it more effective and more relevant. When taking extra footage we took most of it of our villain, this was because at the time we thought that we didn’t have enough footage of our villain and this may be why we hadn’t quite achieved presenting our story line to our audience.

As a result to adding to our trailer we then sent it out to be seen again to check on our progression. When seen a second time we got feedback of approval. We were told we were successful at making the story line more apparent, we had managed to link the scenes accordingly making the watching experience of our trailer smoother and more understandable. We were told to consider experimenting with more scenes just to allow our trailer to have more, and to present itself more effectively. As a group we decided we should take some more scenes to allow our trailer to work to our audiences requests. Other then expanding the length of our trailer, we also added effects to make our trailer more effective, for example, in some areas we used a fade in and fade out transition to allow each scene to mould into each other, allowing it to run smoothly, but it also gave the trailer some texture and a build to enigma. We found the feedback very helpful, and it allowed us to approve our trailer and take on new ideas and work on our own.

How have you used media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages ?

In order to create and understand how to construct a trailer I had to use different media to allow myself to gain enough research and resources to finally creating my own trailer. In order to research for my trailer I had to look at different other trailer posters and footage in order to understand the conventions of Slasher themed movies. In order to find this information I used the internet to allow myself to look at sites such as wikapidia, wikapidia was a great help towards my research due to the fact it provided me with multiple forms of information to do with the trailer or movie I was looking at. A better form of information resource was from the site IMDB, this site is specialized for providing a large portion of information on just movies and media productions but it’s main focus is on movie information, this was a large help because it was a direct and reliable source of information on different trailers I had researched. I also had to consider the presentation of my findings, this lead me to using different presentational sites, for example the site slideshare, this site allows me to create a presentation on a program such as Word and then transfer this presentation

onto slideshare which organises my presentation into a slide presentation, once I have made my evaluation or research into a slide presentation I can then copy the URL from Slideshares site and copy it to my blogger to allow my work to be presented. To protect and develop upon my work I used the blogging site Blogger to present my work and to allow myself to upload presentations and examples of my work to then present and develop as I progress.

To make my trailer I had to use equipment such as a recording camera to capture all my footage. To edit my footage I used a video editing program that allows me to edit and improve my footage this

program was displayed on the Macs that were provided. I was able to transfer my film to the Mac’s, In order to upload the footage taken I had to connect the film to the Mac using a USB connection and transfer, once opening the footage that was of good enough quality to use, I uploaded some to the system Xilisoft Video. Xilisoft Video is a video converter. My reasons for using a video converter was so that the footage I had to edit was the right format for the use of Apple Mac video editing, for example to allow my footage to be of good quality and to enable me to use Mac’s programs I had to convert all my footage to a HD video resolution. Once I had successfully converted my footage I had to transfer the conversion to a folder labelled “Converted files”. The folder for the converted footage was produced to allow our work to be placed on the editing software to be safe and organised so we could use it appropriately.