The document discusses how a student media project's trailer used conventions from three horror film trailers: Paranormal Activity 2, The Woman in Black, and Insidious. Specifically, it used the black and white color palette from Paranormal Activity 2 to create a realistic found footage style. From The Woman in Black it drew on the subtle appearance of figures in the background. And from Insidious it adapted the precise editing to match the music. While incorporating these conventions, the student aimed to make their trailer unique rather than just copying the influences directly.

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

2. Trailer Influences…
• Paranormal Activity 2
• Woman in Black
• Insidious

3. • Paranormal Activity 2 possesses many
different conventions.
• Some of the conventions that we used from
the film were the colours black and white
which are commonly seen throughout.
• We also used a similar sub genre to the film of
which was based upon something paranormal
as we thought that this would work well in our
trailer. We also gathered from our primary
research that this is what people find most
scary in horror films.

4. A similarity between our trailer
and Paranormal Activity 2 would
be the colour tone used. The
colours used in our trailer
resemble the colours seen in
Paranormal Activity 2 as we felt
as though it made it more
realistic and linked better to our
initial found footage concept.

5. • Woman in Black contains many different
conventions.
• Some of the key conventions in The Woman in
Black that we liked and drew upon would be
the cinematography. The way we shot the
trailer, we feel, worked well as parts of it gave
the the trailer a found footage feel which was
different to the Woman in Black and made our
trailer more unique.
• Also, the narrative in Woman in Black is like
ours as the protagonists are being spookily
hunted by the antagonist.

6. A similarity between The Woman
In Black and our own trailer is
mise-en-scene. We thought that
the effect of someone/something
subtly appearing in the
background worked well in the
woman in black so we decided on
using a similar effect in our
trailer.

7. • Insidious possesses many different
conventions.
• The main similarity between our trailer and
Insidious would be the editing. The editing in
Insidious is very timed and specific to the
music. An example of this would be that as a
clock ticks in the music so does the editing.
We think that in a horror film the audience
would expect editing like this so we decided
on doing the same technique in our editing.

8. It is impossible to show editing through
photos so I have tried illustrating it here as
clear as possible by using a red line to
symbolise the sound showing when the clip
is cut and what the next frame is.

9. Conclusion
• Our media products use a range of
conventions found on real media products.
Our trailer doesn’t solely use conventions that
are the same as the ones in our three trailer
influences. Instead, it uses similar and
different forms of their conventions which we
think makes our trailer more unique and will
therefore stand out on the market.