The document summarizes the media product created by the student, which is a trailer for a teen slasher film called "Silent Screams". The trailer challenges some horror genre conventions by keeping the villain's identity ambiguous and revealing very little about the plot or characters. Audience feedback gathered through an online survey helped shape the trailer to meet target viewers' expectations, such as having a mysterious male villain and female victims. The students used various media technologies for production, editing, and evaluation, including digital cameras, iPhones, Mac computers, and online platforms like Survey Monkey and Weebly.

1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or
challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
We have used the conventions of a typical horror trailer in that we took advantage
of the lack of light that usually features in many trailers. We also used a female cast
with a lot of screaming, which is particularly conventional of a teen slasher. These
characteristics of our trailer make it recognisable as a teen slasher
We drew a lot of inspiration from our research of similar texts such as ‘Cabin in the Woods’ and ‘In
Fear’. We emulated the aspects of the forest and the concept of ‘being in the middle of nowhere

2. However, our main aim was to challenge some conventional aspects of teen so
we produced a trailer that was refreshing and different from other members of
our class and previous teen slasher texts.
In order to do this we played on the enigmas and mystery of the narrative. We
chose to give as little away as possible in the trailer, as we felt that a lot of
trailers we looked at in our research gave too much of the events and
disequilibrium of the story away. We didn’t introduce or develop the characters
at all and we chose not to begin the trailer with an equilibrium, which is typical
of many horror trailers, such as ‘Black Xmas’ and ‘Insidious’.
As for the villain, we only gave an indication that a threat was afoot; we never
revealed the identity of the villain or revealed the characters identifying the
villain. This is so the audience can feel as though they are experiencing the
same fear and confusion as the characters.
The heavy breathing during the camcorder scene of the trailer is particularly
effective in giving away only enough to frighten the viewer, but never so much
that they are able to identify the villain.

3. How effective is the combination of your main
product and ancillary texts
We continued the theme of mystery by again not revealing
too much with both the poster and magazine cover
The ancillary texts do reveal more about the film- they give
an indication of the two main protagonists (photographed)
The title of the film connotes horror
as ‘screams’ are synonymous with
fear, and the fact that they are
silenced presents a threat or danger.
We challenged conventional posters
With the use of the black and white
effect for the poster. Typically, posters are in colour but in
order to defy these conventions we left colour out, as it gives
the poster a creepy look, especially as what is in the
background is very difficult to see.

4. What have you learned from your audience feedback?
Before production we sent out a Survey Monkey link to our
target audience which was the age range of 6th form. The survey
contained questions relevant to our chosen genre which would
help us to identify what the audience wanted and expected
from a teen slasher. From this we were able to create a narrative
for our film and shoot an effective trailer that would appeal to
our target audience of teenagers and young adults from around
15-22 years old.

5. These responses in particular helped us establish exactly what was needed
in the trailer:
The overall response to the archetypal villain for a
teen slasher was a male who is somehow crazed, but
most importantly, very mysterious. This meant that
we were able to make the villain in ‘Silent Screams’ a
very illusive character with very little to say and little
recognition from the camera- we wanted to place as
little focus on his appearance as possible
The general consensus for the ‘last character
standing’ was that it should be a female,
particularly the ‘sensible’ one who tends not to
have much fun with the rest of the group.
This is what is typical of a teen slasher and what
is known as the Carol Clover’s ‘final girl theory’,
which we could then apply to our film

6. Again, typically for a teen slasher, the
group of teenagers who become the
victims are female, and our survey
showed us that both males and females
enjoy watching a group of teenage girls as
the victims of a teen slasher.

7. We previewed our trailer to the class and they filled out peer assessment
sheets to assess our finished products and blog. This enabled us to see how our
target audience responded to our trailer and therefore consider any
improvements that needed to be made

8. From our class feedback we found that people enjoyed our
trailer and felt that the soundtrack worked well and we
effectively conveyed the storyline to the audience as they
understood what was going on.
However, they felt that we should have included more scenes
and varying shots and to improve on our trailer, we should
make the text bigger and easier to read.
I feel as though we could improve our trailer in many ways;
for example, I think it should finish with a fast, shocking image
that would leave the audience with a lasting image in their
mind. I think with a bigger impact at the end of the trailer, it
would be more memorable. I feel as though we could have
some more varying shots and scenes in the trailer also,
perhaps we could reveal the slasher’s chosen weapon.

9. How did you use media technologies in the construction and
research, planning and evaluation stages?
For the purposes of collecting ideas and researching what our target
audience liked we created an online survey on the Survey Monkey
website and sent it to all female sixth form students via the school email, Outlook. In order to get some male feedback we shared the link
to the survey with some friends outside of school as males are our
primary target audience.
As all members of the group were well versed in how Survey Monkey
works we found it a simple, quick and effective way of conducting our
audience research. The responses allowed us to model our trailer
specifically to suit the audience

10. Production
For the production of the trailer itself, the video
camera used was an old model of the Sanyo Xacti
digital movie camera. This allowed us to get the
handheld effect that we desired for the camcorder
scene in particular. Alternatively, when we wanted
the camera to be stationary, we placed it on a
tripod to film.
When it came to taking pictures, we found that the
video camera wasn’t giving us a particularly high
quality image. We discovered that the iPhone 5s
gave us a far better picture so it was used for the
still images featured on our ancillary texts.

11. Editing
To edit both our trailer and the ancillary texts we used the Mac computers provided for us. They
are simple to work out how to use, however they take a lot of getting used to as they differ
greatly from Windows computers. The Macs do have a Windows option, which we used
especially for creating out Ancillary texts as we made use of the Photoshop program.
A challenge for us was adapting to the Mac program Final Cut Pro, which none of the group
were particularly used to. Our initial lessons allowed us to experiment with the software so
when it came to editing we were confident in our abilities to create an effective teen slasher
trailer. Once all the group were competent in using Final Cut Pro, we were able to work both as
a group and individually to take turns in editing our trailer together and adding sound,
transitions and effects.

12. Blogging
To present our work we used
the blogging website Weebly.
Originally, we used Wordpress,
but found that the blogsite
that we preferred was Weebly,
and as we had all used it
before we were able to work
well with it.
Any individual work, group
work or classwork was
uploaded to the site by myself,
Kayleigh or Kat.
We had a good experience with Weebly as it’s so easy to use and it has a nice
design, the only issue we had was that we had to upload any videos to YouTube
first, as we were unable to upload them straight to Weebly, however, this was
simple to overcome.