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

During the research and preparation to our trailer we looked into many real media products, and looked into techniques we could use to challenge these and to incorporate into our project. We looked at many things such as title credits, music, location and camera angles to try and see how these real techniques could be portrayed in our own film trailer, and how many be could challenge them.

We firstly thought of genre, and we had selected horror. We researched a lot of horror films through extensive planning and came to our own conclusion of a conventional horror film, and tried to use this is as a foundation of our film through things such as location. The location of our film trailer was predominantly in a dark forest, which is a conventional horror film technique, which we thought would be the general structure of our trailer, clearly indicating that’s it’s a horror film and then we could focus on challenging other forms to trick the audience, but letting them know it’s a horror.

We then looked at camera angles and used a great technique which challenged many conventional horrors and other type of genre films. This was the use of a handheld camera. We used a handheld camera to create tension and realism, and are a great way to challenge normal forms and conventions of a film, as it implies it is real. This technique has been used before, but we thought it would be a great way to challenge conventions of a film, and it did work effectively.

Another factor we looked at was music, most film trailers have one type of music overlaying, or none at all, but normally heavy music when the state of equilibrium changes in such types as ours with a zombie/infected villain. We challenged this normal convention by using two sets of music; one was UB40 – Red Red Wine, which is a generally cheerful song, unlikely to be in a horror film. This cheerful music then turned to Linkin Park – Paper cut, which is a heavy metal song, reversing the mood when the state of equilibrium had changed. Normally you would tend to find just the heavy metal song in a film like ours.

Our film took on a postmodern role in some elements but we used normal horror conventions in some key areas to not leave too much to the audience’s imagination, we thought the foundation of our product could be conventional, with a sprinkle of techniques that challenge normal conventions, aiding our film in many areas.