2. In what ways
does your
media product
use, develop or
challenge
forms and
conventions of
real life media
products?
Our media trailer uses many different conventions from regular horror movie
trailers. It is set out like a typical horror movie trailer with the suspense and
build up at the beginning before moving onto more progressive action.
Anybody viewing the product would see it as a typical horror movie trailer and
that is what its meant to be.The characters in the trailer are also typical of
horror movie characters.We have the butcher who is a typical male hero and
the main character.The male hero is found in many horror films and his role is
to be manly and fight against the monsters. Our zombies are also typical of
horror movie zombies with nothing special about them. For our zombies, we
drew influences from movies such as Dawn of the dead and Zombieland. We
preferred the classical style of slow moving zombie so that we could focus on
the kills and gore effects with some build up.We used typical creepy music to
go with the trailer as well because that is a standard convention of horror
movies.A feature of zombie films are the creative kills inflicted on the
zombies which we decided to make one of the main focuses of our trailer. In
filming some creative kills, we could also experiment with gore effects which
was important in making a gory horror.We felt that it was important when
making a horror movie trailer to try and stick to conventions and not stray too
far away from them in order to be able to compare our trailer to other trailers
and figure out what looked good and what we could improve on.We decided
to develop the character of the male hero further by making him be the cause
of the zombie outbreak.We thought that it could create conflict in an actual
film and fit nicely as a subplot.We decided to have no spoken acting and none
of us are trained actors and we felt that it would lower the overall quality of
the film if we started trying to talk in it rather than just focus on the zombies
and physical acting.
3. TypicalZombie
This is the kind of zombie that we
drew inspiration from for our trailer.
The typical slow moving zombie
found in movies such as Dawn of
the dead and Zombieland
4. Question 1
continued
Our trailer goes against the normal conventions of horror trailers
slightly in that we decided to add some comedy and light-
heartedness to the trailer.This steers the trailer towards more of
the horror comedy route while keeping some of the normal
conventions of horror movies.This can be seen in films such as
Tucker and Dale vs Evil and Stitches.We thought that this would
make it stand out from just being a regular horror film.This also
allowed us to get a little more creative with the scenes and throw
in some funny parts to break up the constant action.
5. How did your
trailer work on
pacing to
create
suspense?
What trailers
did you try to
recreate the
style of?
We made the pacing of our trailer match the pacing of a typical
horror movie trailer. It starts off slow at the beginning, setting up
the action and introducing the audience to the story and the
beginning of the zombie outbreak. It then starts showing zombie
killing and the pacing speeds up with more and more action,
fitting the conventions of a normal horror movie trailer.There was
no real trailer that we were trying to recreate the style of.We had
the idea of making a gory zombie horror movie trailer in our heads
and didn’t base the story off of anything and wanted to make it as
original as possible. Due to the abundance of zombie movies out
there, it was hard to make a completely original zombie movie
trailer.
6. What marks
your trailer as
distinctive?
The thing that marks our horror movie trailer as distinctive is the
fact that not many people choose to make a gory horror movie
and not many people make a zombie one. Most people choose
psychological horror but we chose gory horror due to the
enjoyment of playing around with gore effects and simulated
zombie killing.There are many different zombie and human
deaths in our trailer with various weapons and it can be fun to
watch and was very fun to film.There are not many other zombie
films where you can see a teenage butcher killing zombies.
