Evaluation (1)

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

Horror trailers generally follow conventions, this is often to indicate that the genre of the film, horrors tend to use darker colours and less lighting than a comedy would, along with different types of music. Along with following particular conventions, trailers can often break them too, in order to stand out from the rest of the genre and become unique (though this can be a risky technique). Some conventions followed by the genre are setting the scene, a show of normality, the appearance of evil, realisation of evil, a show of pain, some text explaining events, pursuit, release text and a final glimpse. All of these appear in our created media product, and have been compared to The Strangers.

Setting the scene

Setting the scene is important in all film trailers, to give an understanding of where the story is taking place. It is often a long shot or establishing shot, and we can see how both our trailer and The Strangers use this effectively. The colour scheme and lighting in our trailer is much brighter in comparison to create a sense of normality, which then fades, whereas The Strangers achieves this in other ways.

A sense of normality

These two shots represent normality; feeling secure, stable and safe, which is conventional of most horrors in the early areas of the film. While our trailer shows four characters interacting in a daily way, The Strangers features just two, and so the shot sizes are different.

An evil presence

Another important point in a horror movie is the hint of an evil presence, in which we often see the character in the background subtly. They usually do not interact with the character in the foreground, but simply observe them. We chose to follow this convention as it is an effective way to introduce the "villain" character without giving much information away.

Realisation

Eventually, the characters realise something is out of the ordinary, and this features them looking towards something off-screen, this is effective as it hides the horror and adds mystery for a brief moment. The two shots featured here show character realisation well.

An important feature in modern horror is torture, or expressions of pain/suffering. We decided to show this more through audio than camera work (since we had minimal special effects to work with), but the relation between these two shots is still evident.

Pursuit

Trailers commonly feature pursuit, a character being hunted or at least trying to escape it. Though we are never shown the result it leaves the viewer wanting to know the result and this is where the effectiveness of the shot lies. Our shot features the main character looking for the plague doctor stalking her rather than running directly from it.

Text teasers

Between clips, trailers often include small chunks of text, hinting at the theme of the film or trying to capture the viewers attention. The font and size is unique to the film and contributes to the film's identity.

Last glimpse

After text (and most likely appearing at the end of the clip) is a last glimpse, or jump scare of the source of horror. This is an attempt to keep it lingering in the viewers mind, wanting more. We used this method and created a short clip, appearing at the end, featuring the plague doctor standing over the main character.

Release date

Following the same font rules as the text before it, the date appears at the very end of the trailer. A convention that is common with all trailers (except teasers).



Teaser trailers are a different brand of advertising completely. They intend to give little a way but draw as much attention as possible, and in doing so comply with conventions and break them. They need to be original but follow a scheme. Essentially, the purpose of a teaser trailer is to become viral, to have been seen by as many people as possible and interest those people. These are often short, showing little to no actual story but somehow remaining in the viewers memory. In horror teaser trailers, the main convention is being short with a jump scare.


Sound in a trailer (particularly horror) is very important, and so selection of the right effects, dialogue and music was crucial. It was decided that we would use a piano based song for the majority as they can generally be perceived as creepy. Most other sound effects would be string based (violin etc.) for contrast. In terms of dialogue, very little was used as trailer very rarely contain much, the lines that were used were not in a continuous streak but made sense in the sequence they were placed.

Final Trailer

Analysis of 3 film posters

Click on the film poster to be taken to Flickr, which shows annotation of each poster.

Analysis of 3 magazine covers

Click on the magazine covers to be taken to Flickr, which shows annotation of each cover.

Questionnaire Result Graphs

The questionnaire feedback which could be summarised and organised has been in the form of pie charts as shown:

Questionnaire Graphs

Evaluation (3)

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

Research into the target audience is key to success in any business and film making/distribution is no exception, in order to succeed, you need to know what the audience want. Not only does this mean the film's content itself, but all pieces affiliated with it; including the trailer, poster and any web ads. Distributors and advertisers often do group studies, surveys or look at recent data regarding popularity of different sub-genres and designs. Without this research, it would be a blind shot into the market, hoping that the film would be a big hit, rather than making it big.

In order to make understand our target audience more, multiple forms of research were carried out, these included an online survey (www.surveymonkey.com) and observation of those who went to see a similar horror film at the cinema. Given the popularity of social networking sites such as Facebook, the survey was shared out amongst friends which then periodically spread until enough replies were received to make judgement on the general target audience. The results of which can be found here. The observation part of researching into the target audience showed that the majority of horror viewers were teenagers, which were either in groups of friends or couples. As this matched with the survey data, it proved to be reliable.

The survey showed that "Psychological" based horrors were the most popular sub-genre, and this affected our choice in producing a trailer. Along with most people having preferred the psychological sub-genre, the results show that the deterring sub-genres were all but "Natural" and "Psychological" (receiving 0 and 1 vote respectively). A plague doctor which stalks his victim and affects those close to the victim can have a deep psychological impact on the person and this would make for an interesting plot. It also indicated that the actors in a film can affect the desire to see it, whether it be negative or positive. As it wouldn't be possible to get any world renown actors to star in the trailer, we used what was at our disposal, which, could result in a better outcome if potential viewers have any problems with particular actors.

In a viewing of the trailer, our peers had given us feedback, both constructive and purely positive, it resulted in needed changes of the trailer. The feedback included issues that were not possible to solve due to timeframe, an example of this is the acting of particular members featured in the trailer. Other criticism however included particular sound effects needing replacement, or adjustment in volume and these were taken into account accordingly. In terms of my poster and magazine cover, certain placements and colours clashed and so these were taken into account and corrected.

Sketches

Magazine sketch

Poster sketch