Evaluation task 1 In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

By Tyla Burgess

Teaser trailer conventions A teaser trailer is a short trailer that is often used to help to advertise an upcoming film or other media form. It can be released months before the due date of the official film to help create anticipation and interest from the target audience. A teaser trailer is a lot shorter compared to a theatrical trailer. The teaser trailer’s main purpose is to “tease” the audience with short snippets from the movie and by not revealing too much of the plot. A teaser trailer is normally under two minutes. As a teaser trailer isn't very long so there are not many complicated technical shots, although they usually include a range of tradition simple shots such as close up shots, medium shot and close up shots.

Aims and purposes of teaser trailer conventions

The main purpose of a teaser trailer is to ‘tease’ the audience into watching the whole film, and letting the audience aware of the release date so they no when it will eventually come out. This is also another reason why a teaser trailer is short and snappy as it will make the audience watching it will want to watch more and makes them intrigued what happens next.

Titles and Fonts ✤ In most teaser trailers the font that has been used usually represents the genre of

the film. For example in horror films the title is normally black or red representing death and darkness. Another example could include the following - if it was a cartoon children's film the font is going to be more relatable to that particular age group so the font would normally be in large bubble like font, in fun bright colours to represent the age group watching it and the genre of the film.

In my research and planning I found a clear resemblance with all of the fonts of most horror films so we decided to stick with a similar font so when the audience were watching the our teaser trailer they clearly understood the genre of our film.

Here are a few examples of some popular horror films, and how they have clearly used very similar fonts to each other and they have all

stuck to a certain colour theme of re or white writing with a contrasting black background. Another common theme is the fact that

all of these examples I have used have used a particular type of font which gives the impression that someone has written it themselves, as this gives it an eery spooky feel to the text, and also clearly shows that

the genre of the film is horror.

Here I have taken a screen shot from youtube of our teaser trailer, and the particular font in which we used. We have also followed the theme of using a black background and whet text. We wanted it to be obvious to the audience that the genre of our teaser trailer was horror/thriller so within the text we added hints of red into the text clearly symbolising blood, which would clearly convey to the audience the genre of it. In order to create out font and the

colours we used etc we used a website called fonts.com which is a website were you can choose from a variety of different fonts and also choose the colour with added affects.

The purpose of an ident The design of the ident is also very important because it is the main way acompany will get across their message and the purpose of their ident to the audience and will be the main representation of the companies image. The duration of an ident varies but normally are around 1-4 seconds long. Sometimes they can relate to the film but in most cases they dont.

Here are some examples of popular idents which have been used in popular films. Most indents follow some particular conventions such as they all usually include some kind of text, a moving image and non diagetic sound.

Here is our ident which we used in our tessera trailer, I personally think that the colours and tone of this ident may also suggest to the audience about the genre of our film.

Representation of characters The female victim

The evil character

There is almost no horror film without a female victim, as they are portrayed as being vulnerable and in need of protection. This representation dates back to earlier horror films that were made in a more sexist era. This character helps to build up suspense in the audience, as her behaviour often puts them on edge, and whenever she jumps, even if unnecessary, the audience will jump too. We also made the protagonist the female character as shown in the screen shot from our teaser trailer who turns out she goes mental and becomes very fragile which is the stereo typical convention within a horror/thriller film.

This evil character obviously has the biggest impact on the audience and strikes fear into them. They are what the suspension throughout the film and all other codes and conventions have been building up to. If they are human, they will often wear a mask, disguising them completely of appearance or emotion, and the audience can make no connection to them whatsoever. Wearing a mask also plays on the fear of the unknown. I can easily relate this to my teaser trailer as the other protagonist who is shown in the screen shot it the so called ‘evil’ character and he purposely doesn't speak or have much of a personality, but this helps add suspicion to the character.

format conventions- teaser trailer A teaser is about 15-30 seconds long, basically you want to give the plot point of the film itself but not too much of the story. Just enough to get them hooked, but not too much so they already know the story, but some of them do last for a longer amount of time depending each teaser trailer. Also it may be hard to fit all the key points into 30 seconds. Rough cut

Final cut

As you can see after editing it even more we decreased the teasers trailers time by 7 seconds. The reason we done this is because all of the group agreed that there were certain clips in the there which weren't completely necessary so we cut them out which made the teaser trailer a few seconds shorter which I personally think made it much more snappy and more enjoyable to watch!

Use of Narrative to create Suspense and Audience expectation.Restricted or Unrestricted Narratives determine how much information is released to the Audience at a time. The key to narrative analysis is to consider the wider story rather than simply describing the plot. There are elements of any narrative that we are expected to presume or infer, simply because it would be impossible to explicitly state everything.

Teaser trailers will usually use the same style of text throughout the trailer to create an idea of brand identity for a certain font or colour. My teaser trailer actually uses different font throughout it to create a sense of mystery and suspense. Although I did keep the same colours and even layout to keep the style consistent.

Poster layout conventions posters can quite susbationaly different between different genres. The film title will normally be in a large font to ensure it catches the audiences attention. The main protagonist will usually be a large feature in a film poster (we have also done this in ours) This is important as it starts to introduce the characters and also give an idea of the genre. Most posters will include a release date although not all posters will do this. such as ours. I feel as though we followed the conventions and trends of the little white lies magazine cover rather well as I personally feel as though they look quite similar. We took our inspiration for our magazine cover from this particular one which has been featured in the bottom right hand side of the screen. I feel as though they do look similar as they booth have the sam colour scheme although we decided to have the main protagonist behind a black background instead of white as we thought it would portray our genre even more.