The document discusses conventions of teaser trailers, posters, and magazine covers for horror films. It analyzes the teaser trailer, poster, and mock magazine cover created for the film project in terms of how well they adhere to typical conventions in these genres. The key conventions discussed include teaser trailer length of around 90 seconds, inclusion of production company logos, use of suspenseful music that builds tension, posters featuring main characters and taglines, and magazine covers with central character images and film titles. The analysis notes ways the created materials both follow and deviate from standard conventions.

1. Evaluation Task 1

2. Teaser Trailer Conventions
Teaser Length
Typically, teaser trailers last for around 90 seconds, although they often differ.
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Scream (TV show) teaser trailer
Conjuring 2 teaser trailer
The Afterparty teaser trailer
Conjuring theatrical trailer
These 2 teasers are of a more typical length,
around the 90 second mark. Long enough
but at the same time not too short. Teasers
are short because they are meant to get an
audience excited, without giving away any
story elements.
As is seen here, our ‘teaser’ trailer is a similar
length to the Conjuring main trailer, these are
meant to be 2 different types of trailer, with the
conventions of a main trailer different from
teaser. Theatrical trailers are usually released
nearer the time of the film coming out, so they
generally provide more information and reveal
some story elements.

3. Company Idents
More often than not, teasers have the idents right at the beginning
of the trailer, our idents are a little further in than that. Keeping in
line with the ‘horror’ genre, the idents have a dark background with
a light/silvery white text over the top. The idents shown on the left
are from The Conjuring and they are slightly animated, unlike ours
which are static.
Our company ident isn’t stylised to fit with the theme of the film like
the ‘hollywood’ names (on left.) Our ident is more similar to smaller
budget, British independent film production companies.

4. It’s not uncommon for teasers to have the release date at the end, ours differs slightly
here as it only has the year. This is a trait more likely to be in an actual teaser, as
compared to main trailers, teasers come out much sooner than full trailers.
Another teaser trailer convention that we adhere to is that the teaser has a climactic finish, it teases the audience and leaves
them wanting more.
The Afterparty The Conjuring

5. Structure of a Teaser
Our teaser adheres to structural conventions of a teaser:
The opening establishes the setting and reveals some of the characters (1), it then builds it up by introducing relationships
between the characters (2), and then it shows an obstacle/goal to be overcome/achieved (3).
1 2 3

6. Continuity
Like lots of teaser trailers, ours starts with a series of shots that appear to be in order, happening in a constant time line.
The timeline shown underneath ours is for ‘Annabelle,’ and it’s clear from these screengrabs that the teaser starts like ours,
shots cut together that set the scene and begin to tell a story. This is common with horror trailers, it starts of as happy families,
something that people can relate to and form a connection with, and then it all goes wrong and something terrible happens.

7. Our teaser contains suspenseful music, like other teaser trailers, and more specifically horror films teaser trailers. Our
teaser challenges these conventions slightly because even though it deteriorates into scary/suspenseful music, it actually
starts off with loud, upbeat music. This is different to similar trailers, even though lots of horror films start out with normal
music, it is nt usually as overpowering as ours, I think the music at the beginning of our trailer might give the impression that
it is a teen drama film.
The music that our teaser starts with at 1:49 is suitable
considering the party scene that we were going for, it is however
very overpowering, which is intentional, but at the same time it
doesn’t quite fit with the conventions of a horror film.
The actual horror music which starts a little later at about
36:53 is very subtle, which is suitable for horror, in
psychological horror, subtle music is much more at home
than loud music. However, it would have been better if the
horror music ramped up a bit and climaxed
Our teaser does have a drop, where the music suddenly
changes, to emphasises the things happening on screen, for
example in ours, when the music changes to faster paced
darker music, the lights have gone out, doors locked and the
pace of the editing has increased. This makes the trailer
much more tense, which adheres to the conventions of a
horror.
We added a
sound effect to
increase the
impact of the
music.

8. The goal of horror film is to elicit a negative emotional reaction from the viewers by playing on the audience's
primal fears, in other words, to scare them.
There are many things that scare people, that is why horrors are so abundant, because everyone is scared of
different things, there are endless ‘primal fears’ to make films out of. Some of the most common are clowns,
masks, dolls, demons and scary ghost/undead children. In recent years there has been a common trend of
demonic possession type films, like the conjuring and annabelle, supernatural horrors are the most popular.
Curse of Chucky (2013)Annabelle (2014)The Afterparty
(2016)
Insidious (2010)

9. Our film is a psychological horror, with the masks that everyone wears making the film seem strange and
different to just bland murder. A psychological horror relies on fear and guilt, and plays on the main
character's emotional unstableness, in psychological horrors there is almost always something wrong with
them mentally.
A psychological horror often contains a seemingly normal character who lives an ordinary life, but has a
dark secret life. Psychological horror and slasher films can often be similar with their characters.
Psycho (1960) - Psychological horror,
mentally unstable young man takes on
alternate personalities and kills several
people. Even though he kills, he doesn’t
necessarily do so through hatred or desire
to kill.
American Psycho (2000) Slasher, the son
of a wealthy Wall Street financier is
pursuing his own lucrative career with his
father's firm. He is also a serial killer who
murders, rapes, and mutilates both
strangers and acquaintances without
provocation or reason.

10. Conventions of a Poster
Our posters differs a lot to
these 2 shown. The main
difference is that the
background in ours was
digitally created by us, whereas
the background to the others
are real pictures. This makes
them look more professional,
and they also seem more
relevant and less cheap
looking.
Like the Insidious and Conjuring posters, ours contains the main
character(s) as well as another object of importance, (The knife/The
house/The noose.) It has the White text on black dark background, like is
typical with horror movies. Unlike most posters, our billing block is at the
top, which challenges conventions as they are usually at the bottom, the
reason ours is at the top is because it was the best use of the space we
had. The billing block itself adheres to conventions, for example the
director is listed last.

11. In keeping with the conventions of a poster, our films tagline is
shown predominantly in the centre of the poster, however it isn’t
as clear or as bold as other posters. The Insidious 2 poster for
example has the tagline on it in a similar area as ours, with a
similar size font, it is however much clearer to see as there are
no images layered over/under it.
Like the Insidious 2 poster, ours focuses somewhat on the eyes,
this adds an eerie element to our poster. Eyes have always been
heavily linked to horror films, as they have a ‘scary/creepy’ vibe
to them, or at least they can when teamed with other elements,
such as dark colours, creepy children and proportions in general
(such as very large eyes.) It should be noted that the eyes were
not something we had planned on, it was unintentional, it was
simply us getting lucky with the light, mask and the way we
edited it. The eyes just seemed to pop (not literally) and they
looked creepy and eery so we left it.

12. Our poster adheres to the convention of
having the coming soon statement
written on it. This makes people get
excited for the film, and can add ‘hype’
for the film.
On The COnjuring poster it is
written, ‘from the director of Saw
and Insidious.’ Our poster has
Raybenclark presents which is
similar. In our actual trailer it says
‘From director Charley Clark’
which is something that we could
have added to the poster to add
information. With horror films, it is
common to have the ‘from
director….’ because a lot of horror
films are directed by the same
people, and horror fans always
have their favourite director and so
will watch whenever their favourite
director brings out a new film.

13. Conventions of a Magazine
The general trend for magazine covers is to have a main character or characters
on the front central, witht the film title in white over the top to stand out.

14. Our magazine cover was designed to look like an an issue of Empire magazine. We adhered to the Empire
magazine conventions as we had the famous red EMPIRE heading, with the writing around and layered over
the picture of the main character. Our cover didn’t adhere to all conventions, as it has extra things around the
edges, such as other movie titles and screenshots of other films, which is something that Empire magazine
doesn’t really do, at least not in their newer editions, like the examples are,