Evaluation Question 1

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

'You Are Doomed...'

When we started our advanced portfolio we had set out to create a horror trailer that followed the conventions of a 70’s slasher film like Halloween (1978) and Friday the 13th (1980). After analysing various trailers on YouTube we compiled a list of typical details we’d expect to see a in the horror genre trailer like an all teen cast, an eyrie setting and a  creepy score.

Costume/Props:

One of the stand out features was the idea of a masked psychopath hell bent on the killing the entire cast as we saw in Scream (1996) and Black Christmas (1974). Jason Voorhees from the Friday the 13th series has one of the most iconic masks in the industry and after watching My Bloody Valentine, 1981 we settled on the idea of using a Gas mask to hide our killers identify.

Title and Tagline:

'Your Next Breath Could Be Your Last'

From when we started the project we had planned to create a teaser trailer that didn’t challenge the norms of the genre and even picking the title was carefully done to coincide with the cheesiness that most ‘whodunits’ have as well as a cheesier tagline as Halloween had. We also purposely related the tagline to the Killer’s mask.

'The Night He Came Home!'










Music:

One of the most notable features of horror trailers was the progression of pace that was present in every trailer we analysed, the music also follows this pattern as we generally heard a fairly daunting tune which would suddenly shifts into a dark more twisted tune, we again followed this convention and added a score to the trailer and preceded to edit the music to fit with fast paced scene changes which I feel we did effectively.

Voiceover:

Another key feature we noticed in a variety of movie trailers was the use of a voice over or a screen of text to elaborate and explain certain details of the story, since our piece seemed to be lacking clarity we utilized the idea to give hints as to what the back-story of the film is. The use of voice overs is present in all genres but specifically in action and horror trailers, The Children Of The Corn (1981) was a perfect example for us as the scenes are rather vague but a continuous voice over summed the story up.