Evaluation questions - 1

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

Trailer

For our media products we had to follow certain conventions and challenge forms in order to make them look professional and reach out to our audience. By thoroughly researching and deconstructing existing media products and their narratives it helped us have more knowledge of conventions of genre that my group were going challenge and recreate. When deconstructing we chose certain areas of these trailers that we needed to look at to source inspiration for our own media products.

This included researching conventional locations for slasher films and actually going and scouting them too. We had to find a suitable exterior of a house as well as interior, so did blog posts exploring both. We found that exterior locations are often large, detached houses in remote locations. Inside locations were also spacious and homely.

We ended up conforming to this convention as we felt it was important for the narrative, as the characters were not able to escape and run away for help, so therefore the isolated location helped. 

• Todorov suggested that conventional narratives are structured in five stages, including the state of equilibrium at the start, the disruption of equilibrium and then the reinstatement of equilibrium at the end. We heavily conform to this theory. 
• In our trailer, we start with a happy party environment, with mid and close up shots of alcohol, laughing and talking, as well as up-beat non-diegetic music, indicating a party. The mood changes through the use of typography and sound. 
• The upbeat music ceases and a sinister boom and knock at the door is heard, along with creepy typography with a flickering effect used, reading ‘…who’s there?’. 
• On the other hand, we subvert the theory as we do not reinstate the equilibrium at the end, seen through the last shot of the killer slowly turning his head, at a slightly low angle, adding to the suspense, edited with non-diegetic screams and flashing up typography. 
• We did this because leaving the conclusion as an enigma is an important convention for the trailer form.

Final Girl - Carol Clover

Steve Neale declares that ‘genres are instances of repetition and difference’, and this is certainly true for the slasher genre, probably one of the most conventional sub-genres in horror. We conformed to many of the classic conventions of the slasher film to make it accessible for the audience. One convention we kept was the use of the ‘Final girl’. We used a brunette actress; plain makeup, plaited hair and braces, making her seem asexualised, similar to Sidney Prescott in ‘Scream’. We did actor scouting for this, finding the perfect 'final girl'.

Website

In order to understand conventions of horror movie websites, I deconstructed a few to see what was conventional but also see what we could include to develop the conventions. We saw that there were conventions such as: links, social media, reviews, embedded trailers.

We decided to use a font that looked like it had been scratched manically in the door and discovered the font ‘Scream again’ on the website ‘dafont.com’. When designing the poster and website I used Photoshop to manipulate the text further, using blood smears/splatters and my newly developed Photoshop skills to make the typography look even more professional. I found that this was more effective than just using the font on a plain background as it conformed more to the genre and gave the audience an idea of the narrative. The website conformed to conventions of a real media text as it included a lot of the usual elements e.g. links, trailer, reviews, social media links.

Poster

For our poster, we made it slightly unconventional by not including an image of the 'final girl'. For example, the poster for 'the Strangers' above.

During deconstructions of posters we found that often the killer was seen in mysterious lighting or circumstances, or even in the location of the film. For example, Jason Vorhees was pictured at Crystal Lake. To conform we put our killer through the peep-hole of a door, to relate to the title, 'Knock Knock'. Other conventions we conformed to was including social media, a tagline and credits >>, to make the image seem as professional as possible.