Question 1:In what ways does your media production use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
Horror is an intense, painful feeling of repugnance and fear. When we think of horror we react to it with an uneasy feeling or squeal at past images that fall in line with the word horror. However we only see images, videos and hear stories of what we think Horror is. There are many ways to define horror however in this explanation I will be describing the conventions of horror and what our group understands of the term also examples will be included to illustrate the conventions of horror.
A narrative structure is highly recommended in order to get a fluent story. It is largely applicable to the horror genre it can be left for closure or room for other sequels such as Scream 1,2,3 or Nightmare on elm street. There is always a protagonist a strong man the ‘Hero’ or the final girl which is a normal convention of the genre; the hero mainly embarks on a mission or quest to kill someone to solve the problems. Some narratives are based around childhood pasts or psychotic medical issues and the villain returns to its hometown to seek revenge. The teenagers in most horror films are represented as stupid, immoral and lack of manners which makes them end up being a prey and get killed quickly. A survivor is mostly a female character who doesn’t smoke drink sleep around and is seen as the innocent character.
The character types we have come up with as a group is the main protagonist often the victim/hero of the movie, a villan the monster, psychotic demon, a freak, serial killer , dead ghost or a freak. A teenager that gets killed at the beginning of the movie, police officers that are often bad and not doing a good job.
The themes associated with horror are mainly good versus evil, depression, religious based, childhood issues, revenge on someone that has been evil to the victim, a game, supernatural, science going bad, nightmares, insanity, suicide and envy.
One of the most important aspects of a horror film is without a doubt is the music and sound that goes with it. Music has been a part of horror films since the very early 20’s and revolutionized horror films to what we know today.
Some say that horror films scores actually define a horror movie and what with the absent of sound in a horror film the fear factor would dramatically reduce. The feeling of fear presented by a horror film is the combination of what we see and what we hear, the two aspects working together is what creates the overall horror experience and could not perform without the other.
Horror film scores have become the most music pieces out of all the other film genres this has led people to be able to identify horror film just by hearing the scores. Horror film scores have been in films since the 1920’s and started with orchestral music which has been composed mainly for the film. Most would agree that orchestral music was the most characteristic type of horror film music. It was very common horror films mainly because of the open end and range of the events that take place. Music in horror films adds greatly to the tension and suspense of a scene.
These are the basic conventions of a horror film in general, next is the convention of movie posters, magazines.(Tomi)
Conventions are common characteristics of a particular media that is followed in order to create a similar style of media. In this case, we followed horror magazine conventions in order to make it recognisable to the audience and therefore easier to distinguish between different magazine genres. However, we also developed conventions in order to differentiate our products from our competitors, which would make it stand out and attract customers. 
For the masthead, we deliberately used a big and bold font and placed it on the centre so it stands out, also make it stand out further we made sure that the font was different from the coverlines. This makes it easier for the consumers to read and to recognise when on the shelves of shops. My inspiration was the Fangoria magazine title. The title was typically red which is meant to symbolise blood which would relate to horror as blood is a common characteristic of horror films. We used a font that also related to the name of the magazine name Feast, the font has deep cut that look bites and therefore we wanted it to look like it has been bitten as somebody or some one has been feasting on it. Another special feature we used was the glow. We purposely used a bluey - white glow to continue the colour scheme from our horror trailer and poster. The white glow is suppose to connate spirits and ghosts, as our horror film is about the supernatural, we wanted to make sure that resembled this. The date, selling price and website is visible adjacent to the masthead , and the selling line is short and under the masthead.
Most main images usually use a medium close up of the protagonist or the antagonist for example in the scream magazine the main images is of a medium close up on the antagonist. We followed this convention because we wanted to focus on the NVC of our antagonist, we felt that the main importance for the magazine was her facial expression. Using the rule of thirds, we made sure that her face was in the centre, therefore the audience have direct contact with the antagonist eye, which is important. In comparison to the scream magazine, where the image is tilted in order to create a feeling imbalance, we wanted to keep it central like the fangoria magazine in order to help create a feeling of loneliness Also to relate back to our teaser trailer, I made sure that the image created a cold atmosphere, therefore I used colours green and blue to create a feeling of emptiness that we also used in our poster and movie teaser trailer.
The lighting we used was high key lighting, which would have challenged the horror magazine conventions, we used small light and the natural day light to brighten the image. However, when working with the raw image we found that it would be better to follow the conventions by adjusting the image brightness and contrast in order to have low key lighting. This was effective because it made the magazine more mysterious and frightening, and contrasting with the whites from her costume and greens from changing the colour balance in the poster made the image more chilling. However, we developed the convention because we made sure it wasn’t as dark as most horror magazine and limited the amount of black being used only using it in place to make the features of the main image stand out, like this fangoria magazine front cover. Instead, we wanted it to be bright enough so her skin contrast well with her costume. We wanted to reflex that fact that she was a ghost and therefore used bright natural lighting to create an eerie effect. This all helps create a sense of loneliness and isolation, which our film is all about.
The main cover line used conventionally makes reference to the trailer as it focuses on behind the scenes of making the trailer. The main cover line was spread more centrally in order to differentiate it from the normal cover lines, as well as incorporating the movie title font makes it stand out more. However we wanted to make sure that main cover line didn’t take too much from the main image, therefore we kept it the same colour as the normal cover lines. We used a different font for the cover line and again applied the rule of third on the left as we wanted to create a sense of imbalance thought the overall appearance. A good example is the pirates and the Caribbean, as it given the impression that he isn’t stable and is about to fall without the actual image showing this. We used the colours white and red to firstly resemble blood and secondly to continue creating a spiritual or ghostly feel with the white font, which matches our sub genre.To match our main cover line we added pictures of behind the scenes at the bottom of the scene, which may attract the audience attention and make them want to read on. Also it show that this is a our movie is a special feature of the magazine as they are dedicating most of the page space to our movie.
By following the conventions of a magazine we wanted it to be easy to recognise the products and therefore followed the common characteristics, and by developing it we made sure that it applied to our needs and changed them to fit the tone of the magazine to match the genre. Lastly by challenging the conventions we were able to make the magazine stand out from other and make people want to buy ours instead of somebody else’s (Rosemary)
The general purpose of a teaser trailer is in its name and just like it says, its purpose is to tease the target audience that the film is being created for. A teaser trailers role is to spread public awareness of an upcoming film and create hype to get people talking about the film. Teaser trailers are different from traditional trailer; teaser trailers are much shorter than traditional trailers and don’t contain much footage and dialogue from the actual film. As a teaser trailer is released long in advance before the actual film is released, it is important that the small content that is revealed by a teaser trailer is both gripping and leaves the audience with a feeling of wanting more from the trailer.
To create the feel of a real teaser trailer it was important that we used many real conventions of a horror teaser trailer, in order to make our trailer feel like a real teaser trailer while still creating that horror tone to it.
Uses
Very little of the plot is given away - this was difficult because as we are not making a real film there is no clips we can extract from a film piece to produce a teaser trailer. So in order to produce footage from our teaser trailer we would have to come up with a story line from scratch in order to film the footage needed for our teaser trailer. This is because we need to have a story line to know such things as the locations, character appearance and costumes, captions, camera angles and so on.
Character was a little girl and like most child female antagonist our antagonist she is dressed in a child night dress.
Develop
We wanted to develop upon some of the current conventions of a horror teaser trailer so that we could make are horror teaser trailer to become even better. It is one thing to have all the conventions in your horror teaser trailer such as fast paced, music facial, dark feel, expressions from characters but it is another to develop them to make our teaser trailer be the best it can be.
Pacing of our teaser trailer, starts off slow but then gets much faster with flashes and cuts – Instead of just having a fast paced horror teaser trailer in an attempt to scare the viewer with flashes of scary scenes, we developed a more structured pacing. It starts of slow with creepy scenes of our antagonist and revealing an unexpected victim, but then intensifies as it goes along with flashes of bodies, more creepy scenes of our antagonist and lost hope for the victim. While watching it creates a massive tension leaving the viewer watching desperately thinking what will happen next?
Music – As music is an essential element of any type of trailer it was important that our soundtrack was just as intensify, if not even more intensifying then our video. A good aspect of our soundtrack is that it follows the pacing of the teaser trailer in that it beings slow and then intensifies with the video.
Dark feel of a common horror trailer – Our teaser trailer has a very dark feel to it thanks to our antagonist, make up stylist and camera man. With the combination of costume, make up and camera angles in our teaser trailer we create a terrifying feel in our teaser trailer.
Costume adds to the feeling of this being a little girl which makes the video more creepy.
Messed up hair, scars and make up also help show the insanity of our antagonist:
Image on the left is a scene from "the ring" which
has done a similar shot to ours showing the insanity of the young female
antagonist through a close up. Something that we have done differently to this
shot is that we use a mid-close up instead to show blood stained clothing of
our female antagonist to add to the terrifying feel of the scene.
Camera angles helps captures the facial expressions and scary positions of our antagonist, as well as capture the dark feel and tone of the surroundings and setting:
The first image is another scene from "the ring" showing the young girl crawling out of a TV screen. In one of the abnormal positions of our young girl she is in a similar postion as she is crawling towards the camera but instead is giving direct eye contact to the viewer. This was to try and break the barrier between the screen and the viewer making the viewer think she is looking right at you.
Leaves mystery – It is unknown what happens to our antagonist and if the dead bodies shown in the teaser trailer are him which makes the viewer wonder. After the teaser trailer seems to end there is a quick flash of our antagonist again which makes the viewer wonder why she is so along and messed up.
Challenge
Our antagonist is very similar to a yurei from j-horrors but instead are little girl is a black character instead of a young japanese girl.
Our teaser trailer contains a lot of footage but instead of giving away any of the plot or characters, it is just our female antagonist in awkward positions to display her insanity. (Daniel)
Question 2: How effective is the Combination of your Main Product & Ancillary Texts?
Continuity is important throughout different forms of promoting a film, it enables the audience to easily recongine the products and therefore make the promotion effective. One film that had succeed through brand identity and continity is batman, they were able to use their branding effective and make sure it was present in each form of media.
The highly recognisable logo:
This logo had been intergrated into the poster, which makes it clear to the ausience that it is a batman poster. Although the style of the logo above is different to the movie poster below as the colours are different and the logo is less prominent in the poster, it is still recognisable to the audience, which is what make it a great brand. The logo in to poster is covered in red which is meant to be blood, but the way they intergrated the logo to look like the smiling face of the joker is very effective. The joker is a highly recognisable character in the batman film and therefore plays a big part in the branding of the film, the company are therefore able to use different characters and symbols of the film for the brandiing, which makes it a highly branded company, which means that they can increase the scale of the film promotion through cross media promotions. The tag line ' WHY SO SERIOUS ?' could also be used for the branding, it is the line assosiated with the joker and audience would easily recognise this. the large variety of brand regonition creates a large scope for different creative promotions that my look totally different but all link by common factors, and that is why it one of the best movie brands in the worlds.
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Cross Media
Outdoor advertisements is the most common way to advertise a film, the use of large availability of large posters in busy places means that they company will be able to gain fast recognition for their film. the posters can be displayed in different places such as, billboards, phone boxes, buses, underground rube tunnels and newspapers, this allows them to create as much exposure as possible. Here are a few of some forms of out door advertising we will use to advertise our films.
This is a smaller version of a modified poster that has a comment front Feast magazine about the film. we chose to advertise in a news paper because millions of people a day look through newspapers and therefore has a large scoop for promotion of our film. The newspapers we aim to use are more national tabloids as they target a mass audiences.
This is a larger version of the poster in the newspaper, we felt that advertising her was a good idea due to the numbers of people using Public transport. With millions of people walking through the tunnels of the tube station daily, they are likely to see the large and bright posters.
Brand identity is important because it helps the customers to easily recognise the film that the company is promoting, it also makes it easier for the film company to be more creative with their promotions because they can have more choices of where they want to advertise. Branding is used to differentiate a film from other film and represent the concept of the film.
Isolated is a Supernatural/ Pychological Horror and these don't tend to have weapons. A lot of Horror Films use weapons as a part of their branding, for example a chainsaw for Chainsaw Massacre and Freddie kruegars knife hands.Therefore we decided to focus our branding on the main character, who was the antaganist. As you can see their is continuity through out the 3 medias as all 3 focus on the antaganist, we looked at The Ring and saw that there focus point was also about the antaganist. When taking the pictures for the magazine and poster, we wanted to use a similar NVC to the trailer, and felt that using direct address was effective.
Another area we decided to focus our branding on is the font of the name of the poster. We continuously used the same font, colour and size for each of the 3 medias because we wanted it to represent our film. We chose the colour white because it symbolises ghosts and spirits, which is important because our film is supernatural horror. We wanted the size of the font to be small because it symbolises isolation and loneliness, which is a theme in our trailer.Lastly we chose that font because it looked grungy and scratchy, which is a common theme in supernatural or psychological films. We feel that the font is a stong enough feature to represent the film and therefore see it as an essential feature of our branding.
