Evaluation Part 1

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

The genre of our trailer isn’t particularly gory or scary, we have gone for a thriller instead of a traditional horror. Our trailer includes a lot of mysterious moments that brings the audience to the edge of their seats and creates tension, these moments contain collision cutting, fading of objects and eerie parallel music. Thomas Shatz believed that genre was the most powerful force in films as it helped sell the movie and gave clear expectations to its audience. Our trailer informs its audience on what to expect without giving away too much of the main storyline, we have included some exciting edits and effects to our trailer in order to attract our target audience and get them fixed to the trailer. One of the edits includes the reflection of ‘Sue’ in the mirror disappearing as she starts to feel disorientated, the effect of this is to give the audience a taste of our genre and spook them out a bit. The angle of the camera in this shot will also appear to them as they are in the same room as ‘Sue’ making them feel part of the disorientation. This idea was influenced by the way reflections in mirrors come to life in the film ‘Black Swan’.

Our trailer fitted into the main horror trailer conventions as it included the main expected features of a horror trailer, these being suspense, gore, fear, creepiness and paranoia. The feeling of suspense was used throughout our trailer in order to keep the audience fixated and interested, it also excites the audience into wanting to know what happens next. We also used gore in our trailer as this is a main theme of ‘horror’, when showing the gore in our trailer we used quick editing in order to excite the audience and have a direct effect on them. We also included a slight feeling of paranoia as our story is based on a paranoid and confused character, this helped mainly push our genre of a thriller as it gives that ‘edge of the seat’ affect. The pacing of our trailer also contributed to our genre of a thriller, we started with a slow pace so the audience were able to understand the main story layout, we then began to speed up the pacing towards the end to make our trailer more exciting and create a feeling of an adrenaline rush, which related to the story of our trailer. The fast speed also creates a feeling of suspense as the audience are waiting for it to suddenly stop and reveal an important part in the trailer as gives the feeling of building up to something important. After watching the trailer ‘Orphan’ we were inspired to go with a ‘thriller’ theme instead of a ‘horror’ as we felt that it would be more affective, it plays with the audience’s mind more and included a feeling of paranoia which also featured in ‘Orphan’.

Our trailer is following the influence from the auteur Hitchcock. We have used his ideas of building tension and shocking our audience, he was known as the “master of suspense”. As we include a lot of editing and change of lighting effects our trailer would stand out and it follows some of the typical “thriller” trailer themes. We have used types of editing that I haven’t seen in a trailer before so it makes our trailer that little bit exclusive and distinctive.