In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDtaCUeEtIc
We followed the main conventions that hold for most trailers. Our teaser trailer was 1 minute 37 seconds, which is conventional as most teaser trailers are under 2 minutes, they are kept short to intrigue an audience and our use of titles was also conventional, they helped to explain some of the narrative but not all of it, merely hints: „you can‟t escape your mind‟. We also followed the trailer convention of starting off with longer shots and montages and then building up to the climax of the trailer which included shots that lasted only a second or two and were edited together quite fast, to build up the emotion of anticipation, fear and excitement in our target audience. We also added a slower shot at the end of our trailer, just after the end Title of our trailer, a single shot of one of our characters asking the question “Kerstie, are you ok?” in an echoey voice and we edited the shot with the Ripple effect so it was obvious it was a POV shot from our protagonist when she was high, we did this as many other trailers include one last shot after their title which is slower and usually asks the audience a question that is then unanswered, this is done to almost disappoint the audience after the previous fast paced-action shots and make them want to therefore watch the film as their curiosity as not been satisfied. Our trailer, like all trailers, broke the continuity rule of the narrative, as the shots are not in the same order in the trailer as they would have been in the film, the end shot in our trailer for example, would have appeared about 30 minutes or so into our actual film. However, we did have a basic structure of equilibrium – friends taking drugs as they usually do; problem – hallucinations, recognition of problem and an attempt to resolve problem – fighting/running, but we did not show the attempts to resolve the problem in detail or the new equilibrium, as no trailer ever does, you have to watch the film to find this out.
A way our media product challenged conventions of horror trailers was our choice of music for our teaser trailer. Conventional horror trailers use ambient noises (heartbeats, breathing, rustling) and high pitched tension music to jar nerves and build tension in the target audience; but our trailer was not for a conventional horror genre/film, but a hybrid of psychological horror mixed with fantasy due to the hallucinations featured in our narrative, our film was also not intended for the mainstream audience, but the more underground cinema that our core audience of drug takers will watch. Our music represented the kind of lifestyle our protagonist led and represented the psychological element due to the fact that drum step and psytrance are associated with drug taking and hallucinating and so showed the altered state of mind of our main character throughout our trailer. At the beginning of our trailer, our music started off as drum-step (faster, less „trippy‟) when our character was taking the drugs and then the music changed to psytrance when our character was high, which represented her altered state of mind. In audience feedback, our use of unconventional music had a mixed result; some seemed to think it worked well with our narrative and representing the less than conventional hybrid genre of our trailer, but others said that without much gore or conventional use of sound our trailer seemed too removed from the horror genre to be