EVALUATION - In what way does your media product develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Our main product which is a horror trailer uses and breaks various conventions used by stereotypical horror films and trailers. When making the trailer we agreed that not only did we need to follow some of the various conventions, we also needed to break some. One convention which we broke throughout the entire construction was the theory by Vladimir Propp to have at least seven characters appear throughout the trailer, we broke this as we only had three, the main protagonist who is a masked figure, the victim who is a teenage girl and the victim’s mother who only appear briefly. The main reason why we broke this convention was to create a more intimate or personal feel about the trailer where the audience has more of an opportunity to form opinions on the characters. The audience can for instance show a strong dislike or fear of the masked figure and sympathise with the young girl, I believe this gives the film a more personal feel which creates a connection between the characters and the audience.

One convention which we did follow throughout the entire trailer is Todorov’s theory of how a horror film should follow; EQUILIBRIUM, DISRUPTION, DISEQUILIBRIUM, SOLUTION and finally NEW EQUILIBRIUM. In the case of a trailer, the latter two (SOLUTION and NEW EQUILIBRIUM), should not be there as this would spoil the full film and would take away any suspense in the trailer. Since we only made a teaser trailer, we did not feature an EQUILIBRIUM in our trailer and we started with the DISRUPTION which is the teenage girl or victim having a nightmare, then the DISEQUILIBRIUM which is the sightings of the masked figure following her around, the trailer then goes on to build up and shows the effect the DISEQUILIBRIUM is having on the girl, the trailer then comes to a climax at the end which I believe holds the most tension in the trailer, building up most suspense with the audience.

As a group we agreed that sound was going to play a large part in creating suspense in the trailer therefore we used various different sounds dubbed over each other, as the trailer gets further on the sounds become louder and faster paced to bring the trailer to a suspenseful end. We also made sure that the way we edited the piece matched up the sounds we had used such as when the sounds get faster, the shots do too. One film which we used as guidance and a style model for our trailer was Sinister which follows a similar structure to our trailer with the main protagonist being a masked figure which the audience don’t see much of throughout the trailer for the film. We incorporated similar camera shots and angles and also sounds into our main construction. We followed Steve Neale’s theory that the pleasure of poplar cinema lies within the “difference in repetition” therefore as we followed various typical conventions of horror trailers, we made sure to break just as many.