Evaluation Question 1

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

                  When creating a media product the encoder will need to refer to forms and conventions just so the decoder knows and likes what they are watching. When creating the trailer we stuck to the genre; the genre we chose was horror because we knew more about this genre and horror is one of my favourite film genres. We made sure the trailer stuck to the genre by adding voice overs, captions and scenes, we had to make sure that the trailer was presented in a way that would attract to the audience we are trying to aim at. Our target audience are young adults both genders age 15 – 25. The way we attracted the audience was using young characters, scary dark setting (the abandoned house) and slow pasted background scary music.

The abandoned house sets the horrified scary mood; it’s perfect for our target audience and for the genre. Some parts from the trailer were filmed inside the abandoned house, so the trailer shows dark and scary scenes from the house, some of the parts are filmed outside with one of the characters running, we tried making those parts look gloomy and dark by editing it and changing its lightning and brightness.

The characters shown in the trailer are the main characters from the film off course, we were all involved in playing a part in the film trailer, we used young characters to target the audience, the target audience are young and they are always looking for something exciting, so the best idea was to use young characters and create a more up thrilling trailer using young people, they’re more outgoing and they tend to be looking for trouble or something fun, and that’s why they end up in an abandoned house just because one of them gets curious and starts exploring the inside of the.

The elements we added in when creating the film trailer were carefully selected so we could target the genre and audience properly. We fitted all the conventions in our trailer so the decoder gets what he was expecting to get and encourage him to watch the film.  We set the scene like any horror film, dark, gloomy and in the middle of the woods, where the characters get lost after being chased from the abandoned house.

The opening scene of the trailer is a shot of the three young girls talking about subject of ghosts and saying how they don’t believe in them and then they plan to investigate going to an abandoned house his friend ‘Alex’ knows about. That conversation then leads into the scene of the four teenagers walking to the abandoned house, we used a close up shot to show their feet walking towards the house, creates a tenser mood and the scary music is playing as well. The shots are slow at the beginning and they gradually get faster, creating a more professional look and it links with the horror genre, showing the beginning all calm and tension building up and then by the end it gets faster and that’s when the horror starts.