In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge

forms and conventions of real media products?

Magazine Review and Poster

We decided to challenge the use of using a close up of an eye as we wanted to show our protagonist’s face as she is a little girl who looks evil and we believe this will attract our audience more as it is more disturbing and frightening to think of, we thought that if we only used the image of our protagonists eye it may not be enough to portray the themes and horror that will be within our film. However we did conform to the use of editing the eyes on our protagonist to make them look more diluted and unnatural.

We challenged the use of a house within our poster as the use of a house was not within our theme and did not make sense in relation to our narrative, we thought the use of a black background would be more effective as we could use it to make the protagonists face blend into it to show the disorder in her personality and let the audience get an insight into the themes within our film.

Poster

We conformed to codes and conventions of posters in terms of colour. We used black to symbolise death, loss of hope, fear, darkness. The white symbolises innocence, purity or sometimes mystery, ghosts and the unknown however we challenged the use of blood as we didn’t want our poster to look as if it had loads of violence and gore in it due to the connotations of the colour red being associated with blood, and we wanted it to focus more on the psychological aspect of the poster.

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We conformed to the use of lighting as they lighting we used was a mixture of low key lighting to allow shadows to be formed on the protagonists face as there is a sharp contrast between light and deep dark areas. However mostly we conformed to the use of profile lighting which occurs in most psychological posters when the main image is of the protagonists face, we did this so our protagonist is showed in shadow while the other half of her face is visible and lit to show the split personality that the protagonist has between evil (the shadow) and innocence (the lit area). We challenged the use of under lighting as we believed it wouldn’t have as much of an effective effect as profile lighting would.

We have also conformed to the psychological horror posters in terms of text as the font colour we used was white to stand out against the black background. We have also conformed to the use of font usually used in a poster as the font we have used looks distorted and eroded to represent confusion and distortion to make our poster look more frightening it. It also reflects the idea of something normal being destroyed and eroded, just as the serif font is being. The font is legible, but the destruction of it is clear, as can be seen above

We have conformed to the use of a release date but have used the words ‘coming soon’ to create intrigue and intrigue and anticipation around the release date. However the font of the release date is not the same as the title of our film as we did not want the audiences attention to be steered away from the most important parts of our poster being the picture and the title.

We have also used institutional information such as in many posters to make our poster look more professional and give the audience an idea of who is staring in the film and the directors and editors etc.

Magazine Review

Reviews are important both to film-making companies and the film fans themselves; whilst reviews can often help consumers decide between which films to see, they are also crucial to film companies to help them promote their film. People value respected journalist's opinions such as the late Roger Ebert, and attaining the all-important five stars means that people are far more likely to go see it. Short film makers on minimal budgets, like us rely quite heavily on reviews for promotion. This is due to film makers on minimal budgets cannot stretch to the millions of pounds worth of marketing on a film such as Universal or Warner Bros’ Therefore, I have designed a film review that is well written and looks professional. I ensured that it conforms to what a review typically looks like. I used my style model for the magazine review from The Empire, this is because it has the largest target audience for people who like watching films, as it is the biggest selling film magazine in UK, and is also published in many other countries such as the United States, Australia and Turkey which gives our magazine review a bigger potential target market.

Layout

Overall you can see that I have followed the codes and conventions for a layout from the Empire magazine review as I created a template for my magazine review. My layout is very organised and looks professional, I have included one photo, one text box with information, and four columns of text for the actual review. There is a lot of white space and the house style colours are black and red which I have also conformed to.

I have conformed to the codes and conventions of the title as my magazine review title is also in big bold capital letters and is under the photograph with a thin white line underneath it. Also I have made this the largest and boldest text on the review as this is a typical convention of a film review. Also typically the title is not in bright colours or diverse fonts, the reviewer wants the page to be simple and easier to read therefore my title has been written in a plain black font so there is a sense of professionalism, as usually in film reviews there is no need for flashy colours to entice the audience.

Title

Info-BoxesMy text boxes conforms to my style model by using the exact same information from the red text box such as the- Release date, certificate, director, who it’s starring, the screenwriter and the running time.I did the information font in black, capital letters and bold, I also conformed to the font and colour for the rest of the text after the information from my house model as it is italic and white. I have also made the release date white and bold such as the one in my style model. I have also conformed graphologiclly to my style model by using white dotted lines to separate each section exactly like the on in my style model, the line is quite thin and small but still very visible.PlotThe text box below the red text box is in black, it contains the Plot. The text ‘plot’ is written in the same font as the ‘released, certificate etc.’ however the colour is different as this time it is red. The text next to it being the plot is the same font and style as the text above it. We conformed to the style of the font by summarising the narrative of our film without any spoilers so our audience gets a brief overview of our film. This gives the audience an idea of what genre the film will be. Introduction Of TextI have also even conformed to the small details within our style model as at the beginning of the review a few words of the review are written in capitals and are bold and slightly bigger than the rest of the text therefore I have copied this style and included it in my review.

CaptionsWe have conformed to our style model by using captions as we have wrote a caption on our photograph used in bold and white font which explains what is happening during the scene of the film. Photographs/PicturesIn our review we used a still image from our film which shows we have conformed to the photograph use in the Empire magazine. This makes the audience aware of the genre and themes in our film as the photograph we have used is quite creepy and weird. We have also ensured we conformed to the style model by making our image dominate the page of the review therefore made it around 1/3 of the size.

Journalists nameAs you can see the journalists name has been printed on the end of my review and on the style model, and the text is in bold capital letters with a red font. Again this shows how we have conformed to the layout of the Empire Magazine. VerdictSlightly underneath, we also wrote the verdict exactly like our style model. We used almost the same font, colour and made our font bold also and the size of the text of the verdict is bigger than the text on the rest of the review. We have also conformed to our style model by including a red line under the verdict.

Star RatingWe have conformed by using the star rating to make the audience aware of how successful the journalist feels the film is. We have done these stars quite small and black exactly like our style model.

Again on nearly all the reviews, there is a title saying ‘InCinemas’ on the top left hand side of the review just above the photograph. I have also conformed to this by doing exactly the same, using the same colours and two underlines beneath the text such as my style model.

We have also conformed to the Empire Magazine by using the page number, date and name of magazine at the bottom.