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

My three media products use, develop and challenge forms and conventions of real media products in a number of different ways. To understand how each of the media products does this, they must be looked at separately.

Film Trailer:

My group’s film trailer had a crime/action/thriller genre. We were therefore able to use the conventions from three different genres of film. We used a professional quality camera (Canon SLR) to record the footage for the film, thus providing us with a crisp and professional looking product. In addition to this we decided to use narration, which is present in a vast amount of film trailers, to explain key elements of the story and allow us to use more montage and non-linear scenes. We also added a selection of sound effects to our film thus making various scenes such as the battle sequences more believable than they would have been without the additional sound effects. Our final trailer lasted 1 minute and 44 seconds. A typical teaser trailer is between 30 seconds and 1 minute, however we decided to do a full length trailer. Full length trailers are generally between 1 minute 30 seconds and 2 minutes 30 seconds therefore our film trailer managed to fit the convention. In addition to this, we displayed footage of the key characters in the film and used two separate songs, thus fitting the conventions of a standard trailer. The violent scenes, montages and gravelly tone of the narrator for Jason Dyer indicate the genre of the film and are therefore are of high importance since they help people decide whether or not they wish to see the film.

Film Poster:

I decided to create a teaser poster for my film poster. Since the focus of teaser posters is primarily on a single character or object I decided to have a simple shot of Jason Dyer (the main character) as my primary image. To pull off such an image I realised that I would need to use some studio standard photography so as to avoid having a background in my image. Therefore my group and I created a basic studio ourselves with a white sheet, a flashbulb and a CANON SLR camera. We were able to replicate the standard of a photography studio surprising well. This was important since the majority of professional film companies use studios for taking pictures for use in posters and other promotional materials. Another way in which I used conventions from film posters was by using a font for the addition text (e.g. coming soon) that is used as a standard font for film posters. This made the poster more believable as it was able to directly replicate the text style of other such posters. The majority of teaser posters use the star theory to attract audiences; therefore I included the names of the three major actors (Tom Nelson, Joe Inns and Alex Fox) at the top of the poster. The positioning of the names was inspired by both the ‘Grown Ups 2’ poster and the ‘The Wolverine’ poster, both of which display the names of the most popular actors at the top of the page. Many professional posters (e.g. the teaser posters for Disney’s recent Alice in Wonderland movie) also display the studio name directly above the title of the film; therefore I included ‘Anarchy Productions’ above ‘Dyers List’. The positioning of the ‘coming soon’, website address and linked companies was also inspired by teaser posters for other professional films.

Magazine Cover:

The magazine cover that I selected to do was a cover for ‘Little White Lies’. This magazine is very unique and breaks a lot of the standard conventions of a film magazine. The magazine does not include a number of the standard convention including cover lines, straplines and plugs. However whilst they break the majority of the standard conventions, they have their own conventions for their magazine. The convention of a ‘Little White Lies’ magazine is to have a highly stylised artistic representation of a movie as their main image, with their masthead which is located in the centre of the magazine and at the top of the page and having the main cover line being the title of the featured movie. They include the majority of the vital conventions of a film magazine within their masthead itself. The sections displayed within their masthead are the barcode, magazine title (‘Little White Lies’), puff, cover price, issue number and publish date. I chose to use this magazine due to these unique conventions. It gave me a large amount of creative freedom and allowed me to focus primarily on making the central image as nice as possible since I did not need to worry about including many features such as cover lines, straplines and plugs.