Friday 1 April 2011

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

Below I have chosen 4 screen frames from both media products and my groups teaser trailer, some of the shots were chosen due to their similarites of mise-en-scene, camera shots and angles, I have also chosen some based on the types of characters you can see in the shot. I will compare and analyse each of the shots from real horror trailers with my own stills from my group's teaser horror trailer 'Alice'.


A 'teaser trailer' is produced to grasp the audience into wanting to see more, it gives the audience the first glance at what is to come in later months, our teaser trailer was made to show glimpses of what would happen in the real film, but we mixed the shots around in a random order so the audience didnt have an idea of what a possible outcome to the film would be, this keeps the enticed into seeing the film. In a horror teaser trailer, you want to shock, scare, play on the common fears the audience share, once you have then hooked them on the idea of seeing the film, the feature length trailer is later released to sustain their interest. We wanted to show the audience scenes of the little girl in the past and present, but we didnt want to give away any plot ideas. For example, you see shots of the little girl Skipping in the snow at night on her own, this scares the audience and plays on their fears of a ghostly little girl, it makes them look at little girl in a more fearful way, and if they see someone who looks familiar it would remind them of their fear. We decided to reveal possible other main characters throughout the film in different situation, it is very confusing because you do not know what their role is yet and what they are actually doing in the shots, for all the audience knows they could be good or evil.


We wanted to create certain enigmas throughout the teaser trailer using different characters in threatening and non threatening situations, and even placing the little girl in demonic poses to scare the audience and send a chill down their spine. When we had recieved audience feedback for our first draft teaser trailer, we realised that it didnt make much sense and so we added the little girl into it alot more, including images and vocal sounds from her. We also structured it and timed each shot smoother to link in well with the music. Once the audience had seen our next attempt at the trailer it was clearer to them what was happening and that there was actually a structured storyline, including subtitles to cancel out audience confusion.


The music used help to set the ambience of the darker shots, it also helped to relate the shots together. We included some background noise interuption during some of the shots to show that a ghost was involved, e.g sometimes there is white noise interruption when ghosts are nearby. We tried to mix some music together in garage band but we decided to instead rip some music from a horror soundtrack cd and edit them into a different composition. We also managed to get effect such as our fire effect by striking a match and recording the sound. The music was at quite a slow tempo to go with the flowing shots, it sounded very dreary and therfore creepy when the little girl was walking past the camera. we included sound cuts for moments such as screaming and at the end of the trailer when it was fading out so that the moment of silence could sink into the audiences mind.


We decided not to have dialogue in our trailer and to instead just use subtitles and sound effect, sticking to the conventional standard horror trailer theme where a voiceover is rare. We used many diegetic sounds such as footsteps, screaming, laughing, etc. If we had more time i think we could have developed better threatening audio to chill the audience. instead of the dialogue sound we used the subtitled, it worked effectively but sometimes lingered on screen for far too long which a voiceover maybe could have fixed.


Trailer shot familarities


To create our trailer we had to look at many different shots in other film trailers and media sources, when I researched this I also tried to find similar shots including the ages of the characters in the shot, I couldn't find them all the time but it made it easier to picture the shots in our own teaser trailer if we could.


1. The first shot I have found which are similar relates to the little girl skipping away in our trailer, I had to search for lots of clips on youtube to find what I thought were realistic targets to what i wanted the little girl to look like during the scene. Overall we managed to make the scene creepy, managing to film it at night whilst it had been snowing on a haunted looking winter evening which was perfect. Whilst the scene is running you hear the little girl singing 'ring a ring a rosies' which we intened to send a chill down the audiences spine.


2. The second shot I gatahered from the trailer 'The last exorcism' involving a possesed innocent girl who turns demonic, the look in her eyes is what I aimed for, the deadly glare into the face of the audience, making them watch wondering what will happen, most of the time the audience are just waiting for a jumpy moment and are relieved when nothing happens, it just creates alot of suspense and I wished that upon our trailer. In our shot we managed to get a glint of light in the little girls eyes which looked horrifying in the darkness, we panned it across he face and it was so effective in making the audience fear her.


3. The shot we got for the little girl holding the match in the dark, was part of the story plot, showing her with the match as a ghost. The little girl had died in a fire and from what the audience see, they may think that she caused it and her spirit wasn't at rest. I didn't think we contrasted our shot well and that it was too light, I would have preferred it if the match was just below her face and you could just see her face, like when a ghost story is being told and the torch in shone into the storytellers face. The media shot i found i thought would have been very good but could have been better suited if it was a facial shot.


4. We needed an effective scream and screaming pose for our trailer because after the scream it goes dead silence for a few seconds. We needed this to be perfect to build suspense. The picture I managed to find had the right facial expression we were looking for, we just managed to get the correct dark setting and echoing scream in the surroundings of an old basement to finalise our realistic target. The scene we created was much better than I first thought it would be due to the fact that we didnt have too many places that were dark to film during the day which could contrast a horror atmosphere. It was very hard for our whole group to get together during the evening to film some shots.

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