media A2

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

2. the Conventions in media products -
Teaser Trailer
Conventions of a typical trailer consists of: ellipsis, the narrative structure, genre
convention (ours is a ‘Sci-fi thriller’), montage (sometimes), and the duration time of
30-90 seconds.
Relating our trailer to this, the duration of it is 0:52, which is a good time frame to
show the basic outline of the narrative.
Typically a teaser trailer releases an insight to a film that is still being edited or
produced, or occasionally show the first bit of the film that they have just filmed for
example ‘Train Spotting’ (1996) which is more unconventional.
In our teaser trailer we stuck to a narrative which was put in a non chronological
order to create more suspense and appear more intriguing to our audience.
Within our teaser trailer a variety of shots for example:
close-ups - one of the first shots to introduce the protagonist and setting up the
scene for the audience.
mid shot - introducing the main protagonists and an idea of what personalities they
both convey.
long shot - to give an element of the protagonist time travelling.
The shots used were very different to the same genre trailers we were researching,
such as: Limitless, and Future X-cops which conveyed the same pace however
different in other areas.

3. Sound
The audio that was used within our trailer created a heavy and action feel. We
researched into action/thriller films such as Fast And Furious, and also Looper; this
enabled us to create an additional touch to the emotive visuals for our audience, as a
group we agreed that we achieved this. The main soundtrack used was placed
throughout the whole trailer but lowered when the voiceovers came in gave the trailer
a more professional effect.
We added non diegetic sound to our trailer which included special effects such as the
pistol sound, and also the synth zap to created a feel of realism.
To get the muzzle flash on our trailer to match the foley sound we used green screen
effects. To achieve this we downloaded footage from YouTube and placed it on Final
Cut.
We then highlighted the image and used the Chroma Keyer transition to darken the
negative space creating the green screen to fade and have the individual effect.
The process also occurred when adding the synth zap and the imagery which has the
same reasoning as the green screen muzzle flash and audio. The inspiration for these
effects came from Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

4. Comparison with Looper
After researching we found that the film ‘Looper’ had a similar outlook to what we
wanted to create, so we used similar conventions such as a quick pace and a montage
effect including action shots and weapons. However, Looper appears to be less of a
thriller and more action which is where the genre and narratives have a crossover.
Moreover, shots from the Looper film convey a sense of the shots and narrative is
shown chronologically which challenges the form of our trailer making ours more
unconventional.
However, the same conventions that our trailer and Looper presented were the
voiceovers, we used this idea as we thought there would be a better sound rather
than using speech within the filming; having separated audio where we could edit and
contrast it with our footage created a more focused and detailed effect.
However, our original ideas were mainly meant to be filmed in external environments
although we were restricted because of the weather and our time that we had.
To indicate that our film shared similarities to Looper and had the same concept, we
thought of the title ‘Paradox’ meaning that it is a statement or proposition that,
despite sound (or apparently sound) reasoning from acceptable premises, leads to a
conclusion that seems senseless, logically unacceptable, or self-contradictory; we
thought that this linked well with our narrative.

5. Target audience
Our trailer shares similar conventions to other films
of our genre, this is evident as they both convey
features such as: titles, most thriller titles such as
Looper are mostly shown at the end which includes
idents and the release date.
The target audience we decided was 15-24 year old
both females and males which was evident in our
audience feedback, however in my opinion I think
that most men would watch our trailer as it is a
stereotypical genre for men.

6. poster and magazine - visuals,
comparison and similarities
The visual elements of our ancillary texts shows conventional features such
as: headline, sub headings, advertising, page numbers, interviews, and
promotion from Twitter, and Facebook. From this we are encouraging our 15-
24 year old target audience to use social media to help distribute our product
to a wider audience.
As you can see the comparison I am using is between Looper and my own
design that i have created. Three images were used to create different parts
that our film will involve. All three images were originally added and layered
up above the background layers to have a clearer visual to look at. Most film
posters that we had look at contained had a basic layout, but to make our
designs become more unconventional we laid it out much differently.
We used blue/green background looks similar to Loopers but again displayed
differently, in my opinion this makes it clear in both poster’s that there is a
futuristic theme throughout. Another thing that makes our poster different to
Looper is the how the tagline was laid out, it was realised that our tagline and
Looper’s tagline shared many similarities.