In what ways does your

media product use, develop

or challenge forms and

conventions of real media

products?

Amy Ryckaert

Teaser Trailer

We looked at lots of different teaser trailers asinspirations for our teaser trailers. We also looked at fulltheatrical trailers as well. The teaser trailer that was areally good one for us was Angus, Thongs and PerfectSnogging. It was a useful one to look at as they had asimilar target audience as well as a similar genre and itwas all about a teenage girl. We found that most teasertrailers are montages and although ours has beendivided up into stages it is still a montage in most of thestages and so we followed the convention that way.However, we challenged it by dividing it up into stagesas not many teasers do.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iti5Ej16RJ0

Idents

In Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging they had two idents one for the producer andone for the distributor. The idents also had dark backgrounds and so we looked closelyat this. We also noticed that the idents were shorter in length than they would be at thebeginning of a film and this is key because the ident has to be the right length of timeotherwise it wouldn’t follow conventions.

Idents

In Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging they had two idents one for the producer andone for the distributor. The idents also had dark backgrounds and so we looked closelyat this. We also noticed that the idents were shorter in length than they would be at thebeginning of a film and this is key because the ident has to be the right length of timeotherwise it wouldn’t follow conventions.

We wanted our ident to follow the conventions so we chose ours to have a darkbackground and we included two idents as a lotof teaser trailers had this many. We choseours to be short in length as this followed the conventions and we didn’t want to challengethis convention. We made sure that they were at the beginning of the teaser because thisis how most teaser trailers start and so it would be wrong to challenge this convention asthis is how the majority start.

Titles

In Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging they used a black background with light blue/white

writing. This made it stand out, in other teasers we saw the use of white writing. From this it

was clear that light writing is a convention for our genre of film and so we chose to stick to it.

They also have a voiceover that reads out the titles to the viewer.

Titles

In Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging they used a black background with light blue/white

writing. This made it stand out, in other teasers we saw the use of white writing. From this it

was clear that light writing is a convention for our genre of film and so we chose to stick to it.

They also have a voiceover that reads out the titles to the viewer.

We chose to go with a black background and white writing as this stood out and it fitted in with the

convention. We chose to combine two trailers together as Submarine used white writing on a blue

background (however, this was a full trailer) and Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging used a

black background with light blue writing. We chose the combination not only because it fitted in

the combination but because it was simple and so it fitted in nicely with the teaser. After hearing

the titles being read out we thought it would be a good idea to have a voiceover for ours as well

as we saw this in Submarine and so again we wanted to follow this convention.

Titles and clips

In Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging they have a couple of clips after the title that correspond with

it. For example, they show a variety of clips of the pet cat after saying “mysterious creatures”. We

acknowledged that the clips had to relevant as otherwise the audience would be confused but we

liked the idea of titles as it could add clarity to our teaser trailer. We also saw this in the full trailer for

Submarine where at the beginning they had steps on how the trailer should be structured.

Titles and clips

In Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging they have a couple of clips after the title that correspond with

it. For example, they show a variety of clips of the pet cat after saying “mysterious creatures”. We

acknowledged that the clips had to relevant as otherwise the audience would be confused but we

liked the idea of titles as it could add clarity to our teaser trailer. We also saw this in the full trailer for

Submarine where at the beginning they had steps on how the trailer should be structured.

We followed the idea of having titles and corresponding clips as we wanted our trailer to be as clear as

possible. For example for Stage 2 we said “Find a way in”, and so after we had shots of her applying for a job

and looking up the job. Although the titles in Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging still had a montage of clips

and ours became more structured there was still a montage but in a more chronological way. This slightly

challenged the way that the titles were used as we used them to not only add hints and clarity but to also add

structure throughout the trailer. However, Submarine used titles to add structure but only at the beginning.

Shot types

We really liked the use of an over the shoulder shot to not only show emotion but to show whatshe was doing. The use of the mirror portrays the character really well as it shows her assomeone who is fussed about the way that she looks. However, the over the shoulder shot is notnecessarily a convention but a close up is, but I felt that the use of the mirror added somequirkiness to it if you got the shot at the right angle. There were quirky shots throughout the trailerand so we wanted to incorporate this in our teaser too.

Shot types

We really liked the use of an over the shoulder shot to not only show emotion but to show whatshe was doing. The use of the mirror portrays the character really well as it shows her assomeone who is fussed about the way that she looks. However, the over the shoulder shot is notnecessarily a convention but a close up is, but I felt that the use of the mirror added somequirkiness to it if you got the shot at the right angle. There were quirky shots throughout the trailerand so we wanted to incorporate this in our teaser too.

We based this shot on the shot from Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging as we felt it was quite

a quirky shot as we knew that we had to have quirky shots in our film to add to fit in with the

genre. Another quirky shot that we had was when she was lying on the bed, we filmed it from a

quirky angle and we had her positioned in a position that added to the quirkiness to really put

across our genre. We thought that included quirky shots was key as it is a convention of a quirky

trailer.

Film Title

We noticed that their title was very simple and had a small icon in the corner. We notices thatevery teaser trailer had the title come up very near the end and so it would be key to stick to thisconvention. We also thought that a simple title shot was effective as lots of teasers had this andso again we wanted to stick to this convention.

Film Title

We noticed that their title was very simple and had a small icon in the corner. We notices thatevery teaser trailer had the title come up very near the end and so it would be key to stick to thisconvention. We also thought that a simple title shot was effective as lots of teasers had this andso again we wanted to stick to this convention.

We wanted to use a similar idea to what we saw in Angus, Thongs and PerfectSnogging and we went for a simple background and our logo. We put our logo at anangle as it reinforced the quirkiness. The plain background was a reoccurring themein lots of teaser trailers and so we thought it was key to follow this convention.

Final Shot

After the film title came up this shot came up and although it isn’t the main characterthey feature in the film. We noticed that the majority of teasers have a clip after thefilm title came up and it didn’t necessarily add to the film but either add humour or justshow an addition to a clip that has been shown in the trailer.

Final Shot

After the film title came up this shot came up and although it isn’t the main characterthey feature in the film. We noticed that the majority of teasers have a clip after thefilm title came up and it didn’t necessarily add to the film but either add humour or justshow an addition to a clip that has been shown in the trailer.

We chose to have a shot after the film title because it was a convention of teaser

trailers and as a group we decided not to challenge it. However, we challenged it in

the fact that it didn’t follow on from another scene or add humour, in fact the shot itself

did nothing. Instead, we used a voiceover to give the information by saying “Say hello

to Princess Jayne”. We left it on this as it allows the viewer to interpret it in their own

way.

Magazine Cover We looked at lost of different magazine covers to find a

company that would be appropriate and then we looked

at the conventions of their covers as no matter what

film was featured the layout tended to be the same and

so we wanted ours to fit in with the conventions

because otherwise it wouldn’t look professional. The

magazine company that we chose was Total Film.

Magazine Conventions

We saw that at the top of the magazine it said what the main focus of this issue would be and so we also saw

that it was related to the picture that was on the front cover. We wanted to follow this convention as then we

could say the genre of our film and we also thought that it looked really good at the top of the magazine.

We liked the idea of having a strip in the middle with pictures of other films that would be featured in the

magazine and so we stuck to this convention. We also chose the colour yellow/gold as it fitted in with the

background and the gold colour conveyed royalty too.

The small print at the bottom announces even more films that will be included in the magazine. Again we

followed this convention as it looked effective and was on most of the covers and so we didn’t think that it

would be appropriate to not include this.

We liked how on the side the magazine

cover often had even more things that

would be inside the magazine. We stuck

to this convention whilst also adding in

some of our own features such as win a

trip as this was specific to our film and

we really liked this addition.

Poster

The three main posters that we looked at for inspiration

were Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging, Submarine

and The Princess Dairies. We looked at these posters

as they were the same genre as ours our included

royalty in the film. We tried to stick to conventions of

our poster whilst making sure that it portrayed our film

the way we wanted it.

Poster Conventions

Every film poster contains a billing block however the position of it can differ. We chose however to

stick with keeping it in the traditional spot of the bottom of the poster. We chose this because

Submarine went with this layout and this film has the same genre as ours.

We followed the convention of having reviews as it is an additional way of promoting the film on the

poster. We liked the idea of reviews on posters as they often stand out really well. We saw that

Submarine used different colours for each company and so basing our reviews on this idea we

coloured the reviews yellow whilst keeping the colours of the reviewers white.

We followed the convention of having who produced the film at the beginning of the billing block like

they do on most film posters. However, we didn’t follow the same layout as Submarine as we put the

producer at the side instead of on top. We did it on the side as our poster was landscape and theirs’

was portrait. However, we did challenge the convention of page orientation as all the posters that we

looked at were portrait and ours was landscape. We thought that a landscape poster would be much

better for our poster as we wanted to have her back to back and we didn’t want it to look squished.

Conclusion Overall, I feel that we stuck to most of the conventions

and we only challenged them if we thought that are

product would benefit from it. We thought that by

sticking to the conventions are products would look

really professional especially for the magazine as it had

to look like Total Film had produced it and not us.