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

2. In order for us, as a group, to create our campaign, we had to do
some research into real media texts. This would then help us to gain
thoughts and ideas on what it is that makes a teaser trailer,
magazine cover and a poster so successful. As a group we
contributed a range of research into campaigns in order for us to
work out what our teaser would be based on.
The 3 movies that we found followed the conventions of our movie
were ‘Skyfall, The counsellor and Flight’.

3. Genre
We had already come to the conclusion that we wanted the genre of
our film to be a crime thriller. However we wanted to develop our
idea further and in order to do this we researched/looked into
different crime thrillers that already existed. This was a good way for
us to understand and identify the different techniques that are often
used in a successful teaser trailer. From research we discovered
that the mise en scene was the main way to represent the genre of
our particular genre we had chosen. The main ways that this would
be shown would be through costume, props and can possibly be the
location.

4. This picture shown below shows the
costume in the movie Flight to help portray
the genre.
Above shows the costume that we
used to portray our genre in our movie
Force.

5. Teaser trailer lengths
From research we discovered that the length of a teaser trailer
can be crucial. A teaser trailer isn't supposed to be very long
as its only supposed to give a glimpse of the movie. You want
it to catch the audience in the short time that you have to
portray the film.
From research into the 3 movies we felt related to ours in
different ways we found that they each had a different time
length. The Counsellor teaser trailer lasted 1 minute 3
seconds, Skyfall lasted I minute 24 seconds and Flight lasting
the longest at 2 minute 26 seconds. From this research we
decided that we would have our trailer at 1 minute 5 seconds
as we didn’t want it to be too long like the Flight trailer and
preferred the length of The counsellor.

6. Camera shots and Angles
From research, we found that we really liked the opening to
‘The Counsellor’ teaser trailer where there is an extreme
long shot where a motorbike drives down the long road
that is seen. We challenged this convention in our teaser
trailer and decided that we would have a long shot of
someone walking up a path way but where you would
only be able to see his feet. We felt that this was a great
shot for our teaser to start off with as its creating mystery
as you cannot see the face of the character or really
what he is wearing.

7. On the left shows The
Counsellor and the long
shot of a motorbike going
down a long road.
On the right shows
the way that we
challenged this in
our movie Force.

8. Sound
When researching into crime thriller teaser trailers and the
3 that we found similar to ours we discovered that the
majority of them had a progressive beat that gradually
got more intense and fast pace which created climatic
effect in the trailers. We wanted something similar to this
however none of the sounds on garage band gave use
what we were looking for so we had to re think our
options and take a different approach. We decided to go
onto sound cloud and see what options they had and
through some research we found a music track by a
small band named Dead Sonds called Junk Room that
gave us the effect we were looking for.

9. Another convention that we challenged was that all the
other teaser trailers we researched had a voiceover the
whole way through, we decided to go against this and
only have the voice over at the end. This was decided
because as we also had lyrics in our music for the teaser
trailer which is also different to the other teaser trailers,
we though that it would not be as powerful and give a
strong effect if we were to have the voice over the whole
way through. We therefore decided that it would be at
the end of the teaser trailer. We also came to this
conclusion as we found that The Counsellor also does
not have a voice over until the end of the teaser trailer.

10. Magazine Cover
As well as doing a lot of research into teaser trailers we
also had to do some research into magazine covers to
help us create ours. Through looking at film magazine
covers such as Empire, Total Film and Premiere as all of
these magazines specialised in films. The conventions of
these magazines were that they all had the title at the
top of the page and that the main character would
always be standing out in the centre of the page and is
always the main character. This helps to emphasise that
he/she is the main focus. The magazines also rely on
tags, cover lines, quotes and headers. We decided that
we were going to use Empire for our magazine cover.

11. We chose to base our magazine cover around their issue
that was done on skyfall as we liked the layout of this
issue and it stood out compared to the others we had
looked into. The issue is creative and you can see that
there is more than one thing that is on the magazine
cover, for example there are pictures of other movies that
are coming out but the main character of the film that they
are advertising is the main focus.

13. Poster
The poster that was created for our campaign challenges the
conventions of other posters that we looked in to as rather
than the main focus on the poster being the main character, it
is actually more focused on the storyline and the genre of our
movie. However this is similar to that of flight as one of their
posters that was created is very simple and you can just see a
plane on the poster as well as the title. As a group we felt that
this had an effect on the audience as there isnt too much
detail being shown but shows just enough to have some
insight into the movie. It was decided that the main focus on
the poster would be the drugs so we made sure to use effects
that would be focused on the hand, the title and the drugs.