Evaluation Q1: In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Trailers are necessary when it comes to marketing a film as it's the best way to get the word out and gain notoriety. A trailer gives your target audience a first look at the film and showcases some of the key moments that create a big enough enigma that your audience will want to go and watch your film. They raise interest. Trailers are published on sites like YouTube as well as shown on television and at the cinema.

Comparison to Professional Work:

Generic Conventions of Horror Trailers:

The narrative of horror trailers often starts with a form of equilibrium, just as Todorov's Narrative Theory does, but is never resolved in the trailer as it's key to leave the ending on a cliff-hanger that makes your audience interested. You do however need to give them enough information on the story of your film in order for your audience to tell if they want to go and see it. The use of narrative in our trailer was mainly conventional to horror, however we did have two different equilibriums that represented different time periods present in the plot (one was 30 years prior) our knowledge of Bordwell and Thompson's narrative theory helped us with this.

Mise-en-scene was a very important convention as it relates to various aspects. Horror trailers conventionally use darker colours and low key lighting in order to create a darker atmosphere and signify the themes of the films. However due to our equipment we had to use a lot of ambient lighting, which seemed to make our plot more sinister as it was happening in daylight. Red is a conventional horror colour as it connotes to danger and blood, so we used this often. Blood is a recurring horror theme as blood evokes fear.  White is occasionally used to portray purity, like what we did with Lily's dress in the opening scene. 

 Conventional characters in horror trailers are ones you see in a variety of films. For example, the innocent child, used to portray innocence and purity or the final girl. We had both of these aspects, but you aren't made aware in the trailer if Lucy is the final girl as that would give away the ending. You also get several other character archetypes like the Hero, Villain and Princess. However, as horror films are conventionally unconventional they don't often stick to the guides set by Vladimir Propp in his theory, so we decided not to either. One thing different about our trailer was the fact that we had a female hero and a female villain. This makes our film unique.

It's also conventional in horror trailers to see props like knives and weapons as not only to they show the style of the film (eg. Slasher) but they can also say a lot about the characters. One of the weapons used in our trailer was the Rosary Beads, which were used to strangle someone. The beads, in a way, act as a yonic symbol that represent Mary's strength.

Cinematography in Horror Trailers uses a lot of close ups to show the pure emotions, mainly fear. Often Horror trailers also attempt to make their antagonists more threatening and establish the opposition by using expressionist high and low angles. We did this during the scene on the stairs. Point of view shots are used to create suspense by using restricted narration so the audience can only see what the character is seeing. In our trailer we used this, but in order to mislead the audience by making them think someone was sneaking up behind Adam. Handheld camera is also very conventional as it creates a sense of panic, like in the running through the woods scene.

Sound and editing can vary depending on the style of horror but certain things stay the same. Like all of the previous elements, sound and editing is used to create the atmosphere and tension. Things like stings (which are mentioned in the video) and incidental music that add to the emotion and connote to the genre. Dialogue is important in all trailers to give information on the narrative but you'll often find in fairly scarce in horror trailers as the more dialogue involved the less tense the trailer is. For our dialogue we stuck to simple, but effective lines like "You can't breathe without them knowing". The editing usually relies on short takes in order to help the pace of the trailer. Our trailer pacing was very conventional: having a slow build up and then a series of short takes. We stuck to this as we found it the best way to create tension.

The preferred reading of our trailer was to create tension and suspense as we want people to go and see our film because they are interested in it. It's important to follow the conventions I've just talked about so that the genre is clear. However, we did want our film to be unique so we made sure that some aspects of our trailer (like having two female lead actresses) were original. It's key that we were unique and brought something individual to our project that makes it different, because that attracts people to it even more. No one wants to see something they've seen fifty times before.