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

For this question I have taken screenshots of real films and put them alongside shots from our trailer to compare their uses of mise-en-scene, shot size, framing, character use and so on.

Trailers are made to make people want to go and see the film, if the trailer is good then people will go to see the film. They are very important when making a film as they hope to excite and intrigue the audience to want to know more about the film. If made correctly, it will attract the audience that the producers have targeted. All trailers share the same ideals and they also share the same conventions when it comes to structure. Our trailer, which was one for a horror film, had to create a sense of uneasiness and fright whereas one of a more upbeat manor would have to make the viewers laugh and excite them into what happens.

This frame is from The Boy, I chose this shot as it was of text. Although the text is part of the rules for the narrative, I used this example because this part fades in and out much like the text in our trailer.

I decided to use a clip form Paranormal Activity: Ghost Dimension as it has a hand held camera part. It may not be a running scene but it still has the 'wobbly camera movement that we needed.

For a long shot I decided to use a shot from The Woman in Black as it shows her standing far away from the window looking into the window where Arthur is standing. In our trailer we tried to recreate this scene but obviously with our killer standing outside.

The next example is one that came from Krampus in the scene where they're in the loft and the toy clown comes alive and their torches are shining on it        

For this screenshot I have decided to use Frankensteins Army as an example as it contains a shot that flickers on and off, much like the one in our trailer. This was used to create tension in our trailer.

Although this doesn't show the news report full screen I feel that our report looked similar to the one in the trailer for The Purge. This is because they are both giving information as to what's happening at the time of the trailer.

This shot is from the 2009 Friday the 13th as it shows, as a jumpscare, one of the girls screaming. Again this isn't entirely the same to the shot from our trailer, I feel it gives the same effect.

I chose Cabin in the Woods for the next shot as the music in this shot and the scene surrounding it is very tense, which is what we wanted to create when coming to the music in our trailer.

Again I have used Cabin in the Woods as at the end when the name of the film comes up, it is in the style that we wanted, which is why our trailer ends in the same way this one does.


I feel that the sound in our trailer kept to conventions of real horror films as it built tension throughout and then ended on a more climactic piece.  When trailers are done right, the music and SFX can, and will be the reason as to why people jump. If the trailer and the music don't work well together then the film won't work. This is why we made sure that we took extra care when making the music to go along with our trailer.

Overall I think that our trailer worked well and that it kept fairly close to classic horror conventions. Although there were a few points during it it that I would improve further to make it fit to conventions even more closely, I still think that it work well and am proud of what we have produced.

Magazine and Poster

Final Trailer

Risk Assessment

Story Boards

How effective is the combination of your product and ancillary texts?

The role of a film distributor is to advertise the product correctly and to the right people. Examples of this are in the cinema if a horror film is shown, then the trailer before the film will be ones that are horror related. Also if the film is say a 15, the trailers for it will mostly be other films with the same classification as the one that is screening at the time. Posters will be placed in places that are easy to see and catch the eye of the target audience. Magazines will advertise these films but obviously you would see a article/poster for the next Saw film in a Knitting magazine so they would have to make sure that they send there piece to companies that would put them in their magazines. One of the biggest way that companies can get advertisement is by using the internet as so many people use it that it is almost impossible for it not to be noticed. Social media and Youtube would be the biggest contributors to this as the distributors can put their trailers on before videos that are appropriate for the target audiences.
Reviews are also a huge part of advertisement as if the film does well then more people are likely to go and see it and if it doesn't do well then it'll do the opposite.

This poster was for the 2009 remake of Friday the 13th. I like this poster as it is very simplistic. It only shows Jason's mask which is one of the most iconic props in the horror genre so when people see the poster they instantly know what film it is. Also the distributors will have to rely on this heavily as it is the only thing on the poster.

I have decided that my film will be classified as a 15 as it involves, swearing and a small amount of violence and blood. The poster that i have created is very much along the lines of the Friday 13th trailer and the Scream poster in which it only shows the mask from a side perspective. This is because the poster consists of the killers mask. I made the poster like this because it gives a sense of mystery about the killer which will raise question asking who he is and why the mask. The poster is black as well as the mask to make it look as dark and sinister as possible.

 The magazine cover features the same picture as I wanted to keep the mystery to keep people in suspense about who the killer is. I went for quite a modern take on a horror magazine as its quite simplistic but keeps the horror aspects in it such as the text is classic horror text. But the rest of the magazine is quite minimalist. The other texts I used were quite gothic type writer ones, again keeping with the genre. I used this Empire cover as inspiration as there is a lot going on but not so much that it's confused.

I decided to then steer well clear of magazines such as Scream they are cluttered, although this fits well with the genre this is not how I wanted my magazine to look.

What have you learnt from audience feedback?

Audience feedback is incredibly important when making a film. As if you don't know your audience then there is no hope in making a film that will sell/make a profit in the cinema. If you collect audience feedback then you will be able to thin out what you can and can't do for the audience that
you're trying to make a film for. If the audience enjoy the film then they may come and see it in the cinema with other people. So in a way it is a form of advertisment.

I gathered audience feedback by showing our trailer to the rest of our class. They trhen wrote down what was good and what was bad, gave that feedback to us the we went away and made as many of the changes as we could to make it more suited to what the target audience wanted. As our class is that of teenagers we already knew what kind of trailer we needed to make. The feedback just helped us to refine what we had made into a better, more interesting trailer.

All the feedback that we recieved was telling us the same things. Even though people enjoyed the narrative there were problems with it that we already knew about but people obviously wrote these things down. These were the main comments.

1 The music doesn't fit all the way through
2 The order of the shots was predictable and threfore made the story predictable
3 Music wasn't sinister enough
4 There wasn't enough 'suffering'

Using this feedback i was able to make the changes that were needed. we found some more dramatice music and embeded it in our trailer to give it more tension. Also we went out and filmed some more shots that showed/depicted suffering and put those shots in. On top of that we completely messed around with the different shots and made it less linear. We also made all trhe shots look similar in lighting, which was something that I noticed but there were no comments about it.