The document discusses how a student's media product for a teaser trailer challenges and develops conventions of real teaser trailers. The student researched conventions like teaser trailers being 30-50 seconds and giving audiences a glimpse of the film. The student chose to base their horror/thriller teaser trailer on classic horrors like Psycho rather than relying on modern special effects. While including a central villain as is conventional, the student hints the villain is a woman, challenging the convention that villains are usually men. The student incorporates some conventions like suspenseful non-diegetic sounds but aims to portray a classic rather than modern horror.

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

2. Before I started to plan for my own teaser trailer, I initially knew I had to research the concept behind teaser trailers, and their main conventions. I found teaser trailers entailed specific traits, such as they need to be much shorter in length – the norm running 30 – 50 seconds – than theatrical trailers. The main aim of teaser trailers are to give you a glimpse of what the product (film) will contain. Despite the short length of time it is just enough to get the target audience interested. I was also interested to find that teaser trailers are usually released prior to the films release – sometimes even whilst the film was in production – and the fact that teaser trailers are usually only made for big budget films. This however, is obvious as blockbusters have a bigger target audience, hence making more profit.

3. After researching what teaser trailers actually are, I then had to research teaser trailers for inspiration for my own work. I researched a range of different genre’s of teaser trailers, such as comedy’s (‘The Boat that Rocked’) existing A level teaser trailers from other media students (‘Vengeance’) this was extremely useful, in observing what they did for their own, however it could only be used for initial research, due to it not featuring the same genre or conventions as I want for my own trailer. After some brief research on teaser trailers, i immediately knew that I wanted to base my trailer around the genre of horror/thriller. Although not mentioned on the blog when researching A level media studies trailers, I found the majority of them were based around the concept of horror/thriller. Horror/thriller is a genre that is much more easier to portray then other trailers, so then I knew the safest choice would be to do also.

4. Also mentioned on the blog, I researched the typical horror movie conventions, therefore being easily able to identify where I did follow the conventions, and where I challenged them. The definition of a typical horror movie is; Horror films are movies that strive to elicit the emotions of fear, horror and terror from viewers. Their plots frequently involve themes of death, the supernatural or mental illness. Many horror movies also include a central villain. From this definition I can easily see that I do follow some horror conventions, such as including a central villain, in which is evident within the trailer, hence the title of the film – ‘The Stalker’ – it is obvious that the stalker will be the villain.

5. After deciding the base my trailer around the genre of horror/thriller I knew that I did not want my trailer to be like the typical 21st century horror movies – too much special effects and technology now make up the movie – with clever, thoughtful storylines a thing of a past, blood and gore now consist in horror/thriller with this now considered to be a ‘good’ horror. Therefore I am already challenging the conventions of a typical 21 st century horror/thriller teaser trailer, However this was chosen down to personal preference, rather than purposely setting out to break the conventions. I wanted my own trailer to portray the more ‘classic’ horrors, films such as ‘Psycho’ (1960) which in the end proved to be a huge inspiration for my own trailer.

6. As mentioned before, I do follow the typical horror movie conventions of having one main villain, I noted that the character of the villain is not conventional. Although the identity of the stalker is not revealed in the trailer, some hints were purposely done – to give a clue on who the stalker is – To make this possible I used mise-en-scen note on the last shot, where the hand reaches out to grab the boy. The hand has nail polish on the fingers and the person is wearing a ring. This hints that the stalker is a woman. This challenges horror movie conventions as the villain is noticeably always a man, especially in classics, whereas the woman normally plays the victim. I wanted to alter this slightly and to change the dimensions involved.

7. Despite this my trailer do follow some of the conventions of a teaser trailer, such as. I noted my sound effect of the heart beating (increasing as time went on). This non-diegetic sound has been seen in horror movies timeless times, to create suspense and alert the audience, preparing them for what would possibly be a ‘scary’ scene. Another was indeed the camera shots, a shot panning behind a wall and a hand reaching out for the boy have also been seen a number of times. I purposely chose these typical horror movie traits as I did want to perceive the classic horrors, therefore some of the ideas have had to be well known and overdone. It also had to be evident to the audience what genre this movie will be, therefore attracting the target audience.