COLOUR CODE:
Fenetta - Pink
Lucy - Yellow
Fenetta - Pink
Lucy - Yellow
Lauren - Blue
Ben - Green
In what ways does your media production use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? 
First of all, I watched several horror films and examined several posters and looked at trending ideas and themes in them.Most horror films follow a set of conventions consistent through out the genre, however many chose to bypass these.- Dark/shadowy lighting
- Isolated location
- Female victim
- Disruption of normality
- Sub plot of male/female relationship
- Defeat of monster
Our poster developed and went against various conventions of the horror trailer in many ways. We did research about the horror genre, both together and individually and gathered information and things that we saw were common or trending in posters. We realised that poster conventions of the horror genre differ from the conventions of a comedy or action film. We looked at Japanese horror posters the most because that is what we had based our trailer on and discovered films such as ‘The Grudge’ and ‘The Ring’. By deeply looking into the features of the poster and the layout, we got the idea that in the horror genre, there are usually an odd number of features or characters on the front.
By seeing this, we established that we would use only one main feature for our poster. We also only used one main character because we felt that it gives the poster more of a scary effect because it depicts isolation and the frightening idea of being alone within a world or a space. We put our character in the centre on the frame, again following another convention of the horror genre. I looked at various different horror trailers and focused on the placing of their characters. If the character is alone, they are usually in the centre, so that when you look at the poster, that is the first thing you see. Some examples (The Ring and Orphan) We also noticed that when you have a poster in which includes three characters, they are mostly always in some sort of triangle formation, giving you an idea of who the main character is, by making them the one of the top or at the front of the triangle. (Example 'Survival Of The Dead')
When we looked at the colour of posters, the typical convention of black seemed like a good way to go because black connotes evil, dark forces. We played a game whilst looking at the horror posters. It was to look at a poster, and to see how long you could look at it before feeling uncomfortable. Looking at ‘The Grudge’s poster didn’t take too long to send shivers down our spines, because of the eerie dark tinted green feeling, so by making this our main focus, we decided to make the background black.
Although we used J-horror as our stimulus and our drive to developing our poster, we realised that it didn’t really use the conventions of a typical horror poster. I thought that this was because different cultures allow different things as we mentioned various times in our production that the Asian version of these films were so much scarier than the American versions, which moves us onto my next point.
To understand why people preferred the Asian versions of 'The Grudge' 'The Ring' and 'The Poltergeist' better than the commercial American version, I looked at two non-horror films and compared them. If you look at the film Kill Bill (Quentin Tarentino, 2006) In America, some scenes were shown in greyscale to tone down the violence; however, in the Japanese version, even the most violent and gruesome scenes were left in full colour with more emphasis on blood and violence. This establishes the idea that that Asian viewers may be less sensitive to violence and gruesome details as though they have been inoculated to violence over the years that cinematic horror has existed in East Asia. We chose to use an Asian girl because we wanted to make our media products give the audience the same feeling they got when they watched ‘The Grudge’ or ‘The Ring’.
This may only be a specific J-horror enjoying niche, but it opens up opportunist for other people to enjoy the film as well because the media has become more daring and allowing of what happens in films.
Reading an article by Jay McRoy about famous Asian film director, Sato Hisayasu, I came across the fact that his aim is to compel the audience to the extreme of “committing murder”. In Jay McRoy’s writing on Cultural Transformation, he argues that Sato dream’s of an audience that is influenced to the extreme of murder is clearly seen in the film ‘Naked Blood’ (Hisayasu Sato, 1996). ‘Naked Blood’ was so disturbing, that it wasn’t released anywhere else in the world except in Japan. This also goes back to the point of why we decided to make our sub-genre J-horror. With influences such as Sato Hisayasu, and the fact that the Asian community is sort of immune or ‘used’ to seeing such violence made us want to make ours look like something Sato with direct.
We used an Asian actress because we didn’t feel that it was necessary to use a Caucasian or black one because they are typical in the horror genre (Caucasians the most) and we wanted our film to be far from typical. We did this, again, to place a thought in the audiences mind about previous popular J-horror films. We didn’t use the usual black haired Asian girl, we used a brown haired girl because it shows a difference between our film and the other well known Asian horror films, as both ‘The Ring’ and ‘The Grudge’ had dark haired girls in it. We wanted to put a modern feel to it.
We also used innocence as a main feature in our poster as well as our other forms or media because innocence is a scary thing. We made or character look as childlike as possible, to make the audience feel as if their could not be anything possibly wrong with her, so we pretty much made her innocence look deceiving to the audience. Her clothing, the back being all you can see in the poster, gives another form of innocence because of the pretty flowers on her clothes.
Although we used some typical conventions, we still made our poster unique by paying attention to little details. If you look closely at the clothing, you see various blood stains and her clothing looks aged and ancient making our trailer look old, even though we have tried to give it a modern feel.
We used a typical convention by putting the name of our movie towards the bottom and having the 'Steel Tongs' underneathe the title. We didn't change the transparency of it too much because we had an idea that we want people to look at it for long so that the imagine of the girl facing away from the camera stays in their heads, meaning they've got to look closer to see who it's directed by and starring.
When we started thinking about our media teaser trailer we decided to keep it simple as well as following the conventions of a horror movie. We decided to keep it simple as the purpose of teaser trailers are to tempt the audience without revealing too much and by keeping our teaser trailer simple we could do just that.
In many ways we went with the conventions of a teaser trailer such as keeping the time limit to 37 seconds which is the average time limit for a teaser trailer. Although the average teaser trailer length is 37 seconds, the Ju-On: The Grudge teaser trailer is 1:35 which is about 1 minute longer than ours, the Ju-On: The Grudge teaser trailer also shows much more of the narrative than our teaser trailer which could mean that J-horror like to show their audience a big sneak peak of whats to come in their horror movies. We also went against the conventions, for example by featuring only one asian girl in our teaser trailer we went against the convention of using a large amount of Caucasian actors instead of other races. By using an asian girl in our teaser trailer, we can also relate it to popular Japanese horror movies such as 'The Grudge' or 'The Ring'.
Japanese horror (also known as J-horror) movies are known to be terrifying for their use of an asian girl with long black hair and a pale face. They often tend to focus of psychological horror particularly involving ghosts and poltergeists, while many contain themes of possession, exorcism, shamanism and precognition. They also like to build anticipation by getting to the point slowly. The success of 1998 movie 'Ring' brought the image of the yūrei to Western popular culture although the image has existed in Japan for centuries. An image of yūrei is often very similar in most J-horror movies, they are usually seen wearing white clothing which is the colour of funeral garb in Japan which we tried to follow as closely as possible. Although our costume wasn't entirely white and had a floral print, it was the typical out-dated dress seen worn in J-horrors. This could show that we have both followed the conventions of a J-horror yet went against it in our own way, by using a floral dress instead of a white one we can argue that we wanted to give it a Western feel.
The yūrei also are known to have long black hair which comes from the tradition of ancient Japanese women growing their hair very long and wearing it pinned up until their death where it is let down. We decided to use this convention in our teaser trailer, to an extent that her face is not revealed but hidden behind her hair.Although we tried to follow the convention of J-horror, i also think we challenged the typical convention of the long black hair as my hair wasn't entirely black, this could show that we are bringing a modern feel to the Japanese convention as these days Japanese girls are known for their lightly dyed hair:
Usually in some horror films, the only survivor is often female (horror films such as Halloween, Scream, Friday 13th) but in our case we don't have a female survivor or any survivors as our teaser trailer doesn't show too much so therefore the survivors are not yet revealed. The killer in most horror films is a single male (such as in Halloween, Friday 13th part 2 and Nightmare on Elm Street) but we challenged this convention by making our killer a female child and children are stereotyped to be known as innocent and childish.
I can see that there is a clear colour link to our film poster and the Halloween and Friday the 13th film posters, all posters have used white fonts which i think is a neutral colour, it also contrasts against the black background which both posters and our film poster have used. On the Friday the 13th poster the '13' is in red which is similar to the 'bye' in our film poster, this could be a hint indicating that both movies will contain blood and gore. Another thing is that the red lettering seem to be at the end of the title which could connote death at the end of the movie, the same thing applies to our movie Teasers are also commonly used in advertising. The so-called teaser ad or teaser campaign typically consists of a series of small, cryptic, challenging advertisements which anticipate a large, full-blown campaign for a product launch or otherwise important event. - Wikipedia
Teaser trailers are to create a buzz and also give the audience expectations of how the actual movie is going to look in the end. Teasers produce an enigma and eventhough they do not produce much about the narrative, they keep the audience involved and interested in the whole process of the movie. Therefore the audience are part of the prosess knowing that the moving is on its way to be realeased.
Movie teasers unlike typical trailers which are long in length, teaser trailers are small in length (between 30-60 seconds) normally the trailers have little, if not any actual footage of the actual film. Teaser trailers are made when films are still in production, or even before they have been even filmed. Teaser trailers are usually made for big budged film production. and the follow certain conventions.
Most teasers follow a conventional guidelines, this means that the length of the teaser sticks to the conventional 30-50 seconds. This short time for a teaser means an enigma is created for the film. Some teasers are shown even a year before the movies release date which produces a interesting buzz about the movie long before it's realised.
Twilight (59 Seconds)
Twilight (59 Seconds)
Inbred (51 seconds)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaiuYnB1HUo -- Scooby doo (1min 6 seconds) including titles
These 3 teasers, eventhough very differnt in genre keep to the whole convetions of a teaser, in which they all do not give much of a storyline away and also they all are less than a minute in length which is also conventional.
In the teaser "Lullabye" between each shot there is a specific time period to produce a contiuous flow throught the trailer, so it doesn't become to jumpy and make no sense at all. Between each shot there are 4 seconds, then once the end of the teaser become close each shot is 2 seconds, this creates a quick change for the audience, this connotes that the audience are not in control and anything can happen at any time.
By watching many Horror teaser trailers I have realised the main conventions are
-Fast shots
-Simplistic ideas
- Asian characters
- dark tinted shots
- childlike characters
- fast cuts
- Challenge stereotypes (to produce a scare factor)
Keeping the trailer to the normal conventions means that the final product can create a buzz for the fact that experimental methods were used during the filming of the video. Using filming methods such as experimenting with the focus of the shot. This makes the teaser conventional in the fact it has an Asian main character. Also it stands out from the rest because it uses a unique simplistic idea.
The teaser keeps to the normal conventions also as it shows a sequence of random shots, that don't really make much sense, added with small parts of writing that add a story to the whole final product, the simplistic teaser is conventional because it does what it's meant to do. The main idea for this product was it to stay simple and create a buzz about the whole movie, by producing a teaser with not much length, and also not giving much of the storyline away it produces a feeling for the audience wondering what will happen next.
This can be shown by the teaser of "The Ring" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHa7dcCntyI , This teaser follows the normal conventions, it shows a minor storyline, mixed with random shots shown in interesting ways. This trailer is not horror, however it shows the normal conventions of teaser trailers, and it makes you want to see that movie and find out more about it.
"Lullabye" shows this type of convention, I decided this was a good idea because it produces a simple but effective trailer. Using the normal conventions is very risky as it you have many videos that your up against with the same type of idea, however the main product was produced showing a unique vision which I believed was pulled of to the best of my advantage.
Challenging the forms of the conventions would have brought our video off track, in other words the video may have seen to be a different type of genre because it was so far from normal conventions. This therefore could have meant the audience looking at the video would have seen it as unrealistic and very unprofessional because it didn't follow the normal type of genre conventions, I decided that following a normal type of genre convention would have been a good idea because we could be creative and experiment to produce a normal teaser trailer with a very interesting outcome.
The final outcome therefore meant the teaser could look conventional but stand out because it is has interesting shots, My favourite shot is the first shot of Lucy lifting her head and the focus slowing changing, this made the opening to the video very interesting. Also not many teaser have shots like this that change the focus throughout the whole shot. This made the video interesting from the opening of it.
The main convention from which we followed with our Movie Front Cover product is the main image which is a Close-Up shot. This close up shot is used in many Movie Magazine Covers and can be seen as a common trait in this field. For top Magazines such as Empire, and Total magazine. The background colour 'black' is a challenge form of convention as we wanted to represent our theme which is horror. Black represents strange and sinister which is the message that we wanted to convey. We also wanted to challenge the almost sweet stereotype of a small Asian girl, this is why our character looks more mysterious Displayed in the NVC. This became helpful too let our target audience understand our movie genre beyond the image as there is more to her than meets the eye.
Upon construction of the Movie Magazine Front Cover I noticed the 'THE' word sticking out on the Masthead and suggested to the team that that this was moved to the side of the 'BIG SCREEN' as we needed to use an equal parameters, as a rectangular shape is a common convention for a Masthead a form of a real Movie Magazine. And also allowed the magazine to look more organised and professional instead of Messy and amateur, which is a common mistake in new up and coming movie magazine front covers. Although we used 3 words, this allowed me to develop a form of convention as most movie magazines use 1 to 2 words for a name. We also challenge conventions when constructing the Masthead as we place it on top of the main image, which is not common for real film magazines as they usually place the characters image on top of the masthead. Our reason for this is the magazine is not well established, and the Masthead may not be recognised should we do so. White was also used to allow the magazine to stand out amongst the other coverlines etc.
We also challenged the convention of placing the magazine punch line on top of the title, instead we asked the audience a question “IS THIS THE GREATEST YEAR OF RELEASE FOR HORROR MOVIES?” As we believe that communication with the audience is more important than telling audience a boastful headline, as from our market research we found the main reason for a consumers reading film magazines is too read on discussion around films.
We decided our Barcode needed to be placed on the lower right hand corner of the magazine, which followed the conventions of a real magazine. And we thought if the barcode was placed on the left side that it would stick out too much as people read from left to right. And also if placed further up everything would look more squashed and amateur as a result.
The main coverline is centred which is a convention that we followed, as this is a common convention in most magazines when we conducted our market research.
Our Dateline is placed under the masthead this can been seen as developing conventions of a real magazine, as most magazines place the Dateline on top on the Masthead or as Empire magazine do in between one of the letters, we placed the Dateline under the masthead as we didn't want to plagiarise the EMPIRE magazine and thought that this also simply enhanced the layout of the magazine. Coverlines were placed along either side of the of the magazine front cover as it is a usual convention to balance all the writing on a magazine.
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