EVALUATION – A2 MEDIA STUDIES

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and
conventions of real media products?
Our media product uses and challenges conventions of real media products through the use
of general trailer codes that include a variety of shots, settings, characters, make up,
narrative, music, titles and credits.

The conventions of a film trailer that we used were Titles, such as vendetta productions...
credits, the coming soon text at the end.. Frightening music, sound effects, such as screams
and blood ... transitions, such as flashes to add to the impact of the trailer ... shot clips, to
create build up of pace... main characters, such as larissa and amie and fractions of the thing
and quick cuts to make it seem like a horror trailer.

In our group trailer we have used women as our victims as they are stereotypically more
vulnerable than males. We have challenged this by adding a twist to the characters and
instead of using a male actor as the killer we all decided to use a female, making this
character look scarier with makeup and the clothes used in the trailer. To even out this we
decided to use a male voice over.

How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
The ancillary tasks I produced relate to our trailer through the darkness depicted in them,
the brand name of our film and the flashing pentagram. This creates a house style of our
main media product along with my poster and magazine which ultimately adds to the
effectiveness of promoting the film.

I have used the supernatural being as the cover of my poster and magazine to represent the
genre of our film and because I think that it is eye catching and would promote the film in a
better way than if I were to display either of the victims on the cover.

Overall, I think the combination of our media product with my ancillary tasks works well
because you see a bit of everything of the film in the products
What have you learned from your audience feedback?
Audience feedback has helped me make the horror trailer better, they’ve told me
what they don’t like about it and ways in which it could be better and have told me
the bits they do like and why they like them.

Their feedback has given me a rough idea of what people are looking for in a horror
movie and what they don’t like about horror movies.

For example, one criticism was that scenes did not fade in with each other, during
the construction stage, so we changed that and made the trailer look better than it
did.

How did you use media technologies in the construction and research,
planning and evaluation stages?
New media technologies were vital for the construction, research and planning of
our Horror trailer.

For the construction we used Final Cut Express to edit our trailer, Photoshop to
create my magazine and poster and movie maker to prepare for editing our trailer.

For my research I used Google to search for helpful sites that improved my
understanding of trailer conventions and how we can apply them to our trailer. I also
used YouTube to view horror trailers and get ideas.

For the planning, we used a navigation application on our phones to direct us to a

suitable location for the filming of our trailer. We used an app called ‘Around Me’ on
iPhone that shows the places in the vicinity you are situated in and that made us find
an abandoned asylum.

Nicole Rossiter