Wednesday, 7 March 2012

Evaluation Question 1

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

Trailers are important to advertise a newly released film and to attract target audience. It is essential to make the trailer suitable for the specific genre of the film. This will make specific audiences easier to target. As Thomas Schatz, the main critic behind Genre Theory writes in his book Hollywood Genres, 'It is important to know exactly what is required to appeal to the target audience of genre fans'. As our trailer is a horror trailer it is important give the a idea of the film plot but also to make you shudder and feel scared as this is the idea of a horror film. This comes from the whole foundation of a genre which is based on the French word 'horrere', meaning 'to shudder.'

When planning and producing our horror trailer we stuck to certain horror conventions and features that are all important in horror films. For example the mise-en-scene of a horror film would include horrorlow-key lighting, unsettling locations and body horror. Successful body horror should make the audience shudder. For example in 'Nightmare On Elm Street' (2010) the body horror is very creative and different such as in the scene where the obvious female victim is laying in bed with a guy and then suddenly sliced in half. This gore scene is very graphic and dramatic. Another convention for a successful horror film is creating characters that fit the forms and conventions of a horror film. In our trailer we decided to have a psycho killer, killer similar to Norman Bates in' Psycho', female survivor,(like Lila in Psycho), male hero (like Peter in 'Dawn of the Dead' (DOTD, 1979) and a female victim who would die first just like Monica from 'DOTD' 2004.











In our horror trailer we filmed establishing shots of the different parts of our creepy location. We also used lots of close up angles and found this an effective technique as it makes the focus in the scene more dramatic. This style can be seen a lot in the low budget 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers' (1953) and 'Evil Dead' (1981) and we tried to model our style on successful low budget films like these. A good example of a close up angle that inspired us was from 'Dawn of the Dead' (1979) when the zombies are ripping the human's guts out.












Our trailer started off quite relaxed introducing the characters in a realistic setting that is familiar to a teenage audience. At the beginning of our trailer there is a scene where the teenage characters are in the car listening to music, messing about and informing their friends about the trip. The more the audience identifies with the characters the more they believe what happens next could happen to them. and we carefully focussed 'Insanitarium' at a young adult audience. The pace of our music and sound effects become more tense and spooky as the setting changes to a creepy location of an abandoned Psychiatric hospital. This idea was influenced by Norman Bates' house in 'Psycho' (1960).

When analysing horror trailers, for example, I was looking at the 'Shutter' horror trailer I noticed that the majority of shots were close up and extreme close ups and this made the trailer very dramatic and portrayed the characters emotions. In our trailer we filmed lots of close up scenes of scared reaction shots of the characters and skewed close up angles of the characters looking lost and confused.

To give the audience more narrative information we opted for text screens instead of a voice-over. After viewing lots of horror trailers we found that text was more suitable as the voice-over made the trailer sound comical. When analysing the 'Toxic Avenger' (1984) trailer we thought the voice over was distracting and too repetitive. We wanted to make the audience feel nervous and tense and make them feel on edge. Several running scenes and breathing noises created drama, and the slamming door near the end of our trailer created a feeling of entrapment.










In making a horror film and trailer bringing 'auteur' influences is important to making the film personal. I have watched a large number of horror trailers with the same 'psycho killer', but I think that what makes a horror film really exiting is having a killer that is different from your average 'mysterious man/woman with a knife'. For my horror trailer I chose to include a creepy surgeon killer as this adds a different exiting edge to the trailer. None of the horror films and trailers I watched on YouTube had a surgeon psycho killer. We were also influenced by existing auteurs and when studying Tom Savini and his body horror influence of the Vietnam war it inspired me to create my own gore for the horror trailer.






Listed to the left are our screenshots from our trailer. I have compared them with shots from existing trailers.

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