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

From analysing existing products within horror, we were able to deconstruct the codes and conventions of the genre to utilise them when creating our advanced portfolio. Our media product includes many different conventions that we followed but also challenged in order to create our own unique selling point (USP).

For our teaser trailer, we followed specific conventions such as the use of fast paced editing to create suspense and show certain shots of the film to appeal and anchor our target audience by revealing a glimpse of the narrative. Existing trailers such as Insidious, Sinister and The Conjuring exerted the most influence of our product by acknowledging dark lightning and de-saturated colour palette to keep things obscure and allowing the audience to use their creative imagination. Our narrative enigma links to The Conjuring as our teaser trailer was a sequel to the franchise. However, our trailer was challenged as in most horrors, they reveal the demon but we chose to not reveal the antagonist.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roJDy5n7Hkk

Trailer Development

Magazine development

We followed a house style throughout the trailer, the magazine and the film poster so it is easily identifiable by the audience. For example, we used the same conventions shown in ‘Little White Lies’ including a graphic main focal point with a distinctive logo and barely any sell lines. We followed this with a close up shot of our antagonist but developed this by altering the circle logo to a triangular shape in order to act as our USP.

Unique Logo

One main focal image

No sell lines

Graphic styled format

Poster Development

For our poster, our main influence came from ‘The house at the end of the street’ which gave us a layout of how we would want ours. i.e. close up shot to emphasise the facial expressions with the haunted house behind. However, we challenged this by using a female from an Asian background and to link it to our film, we included the doll in one of the windows to reinforce the name of our film, thus linking back to the narrative.

We followed the main generic conventions such as dark lighting, worried facial expression and close up shots to anchor our genre.