In What Ways Does Your Media Product Use, Develop, or Challenge Forms and Conventions of Real Media Products? by Alex Roberts

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

4. At the beginning of a trailer, an ident (or multiple idents) will be shown to identify
the companies associated with the films creation. As of recent years, idents have
been adapted to the genre of the film in order to match its mood and atmosphere
more. For example, the Warner Bros. idents below are clearly different – the one on
the right is the standard, regular ident featuring a light blue sky and shiny logo,
whilst the ident on the left is from the latest Hobbit film’s teaser, and is darker, with a
more worn and textured logo to bring a darker atmosphere and theme that reflects
on the film.
Our ident follows that convention and tries to create a sinister atmosphere with
the dark blue colours and black font. Thunder generally creates a feeling of tension
and suspense, synchronizing well with our horror genre that tries to put the
audience on edge. The lightning creates a feeling of danger to make the audience
feel unsafe.
IDE
NT

5. As well as in our trailer, we included
our logo on our movie poster at the
bottom. Unlike the ident, the font was
white in order to be visible on the black
background.
In this media the logo isn’t even close
to being the center of attention and so it
doesn’t need to be wildly altered to fit a
style. It keeps continuance in font choice
but is otherwise completely different from
the ident.
IDE
NT

7. Camera angles are utilised in many different ways to give different effects,
whether to show positions of power or highlight something important. In horror
trailers, tension can be created by a camera angle positioned high up looking down
upon a lone character. It creates space in the shot to give the idea of vulnerability,
as well as the idea that someone or something is watching the character as per the
horror genre. Generally it involves the character not looking towards where the
camera is, which leaves them unaware and the audience on edge to see what
happens to their ignorance. An example of this technique is in the JESSABELLE
trailer (screenshots below), where the character is being haunted by a curse.
We took this and used it ourselves at the beginning of our trailer, looking down
upon one of the characters who’s oblivious to the threat above them. We decided
not to be as subtle and included slow dialogue from the creature watching to raise
tension and give some character to the antagonist.
CAMERAW
ORK

8. Camerawork is used in our other media, too. In our movie
poster we use a head-on shot of the doll to have it looking
directly at the viewer in order to create discomfort. This is a
typical convention of horror movie posters, that more often than
not feature the antagonist staring forward at the audience, as
exampled below.
Meanwhile in our magazine cover we used an image of
Alden looking to the side, choosing this angle to connote the
character being unable to face the fear-inducer in the film. This
is further implied by the image of the doll incorporated into the
back of his head that he’s turned away from, and the style of the
CAMERAW
ORK

10. It’s quite a common convention to split up different shots within a teaser trailer
with different types of credits. Usually they state the month and/or year that the
movie will be released, exampled below by the “This May” screenshot from the
‘Avengers: Age of Ultron’ trailer. Other times they will name the director, or refer to
them by their previous work experiences. In the example from the latest Hobbit
trailer, it makes reference to the “director of The Lord of the Rings trilogy” which is a
memorable film series that gives status to the director.
We used this convention in our trailer, breaking up the scene at the start with a
credit title for our director. Our movie and director aren’t well-known and are
relatively new to the industry, so we simply named the director instead of using a
previous film title to show prior accomplishments. The font we used is easy to read
and stands out appropriately from the black background.
CREDITS

11. We used credits in our movie poster, at the top where we put our main actor’s
name, and at the bottom where we put our billing block. Both are large conventions
of movie posters, and we included them in order to have a more accurate poster.
The billing block was made using the SteelTongs font.
CREDITS