Evaluation Questions

Q.2 In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media product?

My media product is a teaser trailer of a horror movie. In horror genre a great deal of suspense is kept and enigma plays a vital role. For my teaser trailer I analyzed two trailers, one of the Blair Witch Project and other of The Silence of the Lambs. Also Hassan analyzed trailers of Paranormal Activity 1 and 2. And after analyzing we noticed some very similarities in then, some of then are listed below:

• A great deal of suspense in kept and the ‘trouble maker’ is not shown.
• Texts are added to the sequence to convey some what of information.
• They all followed some what of Tendorov’s narrative theory of equilibrium; on at the end equilibrium is not re-established.
• A fast pace editing.
• Creepy sound effects.
• Deaths of characters.
• Misc- en scene is kept dark i.e. location are scary and contain dark elements e.g. Forests and Basements. Daylight is not shown.
• Hand held and surveillance camera recordings (instead of The Silence of the Lambs)

So while we were deciding the location and props we kept in our minds these all factors to establish verisimilitude. Even when I was editing the trailer In kept in my mind how would I use the sound effects to elaborate the conditions of the characters as did in the real media products. And I use fast pace editing to create tension in my audience.

So, basically in my media product I used and developed the form and conventions of Horror genre to make my product understandable to our audience.

In the ancillary texts, in our case poster and magazine, we decided to challenge the forms by not taking a solo picture for editing. Instead we used shots of locations and used blood effects to make them scary. In magazine cover, we showed an eye to disturb the audience. The magazine follows a typical way in which a horror movie is shown but in our case we challenged them by creating an image of location instead of a character.

Poster was indeed the most rebellious of all. The use of a location image as main shot and using more creative and gory effects Hassan was able to pull off a great poster. It had all elements of a poster i.e. told about Characters and even had a tag line but we were greatly appreciated by our fellows on how we broke the ‘boring; routine of character image manipulation.

Posted By Zayan