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

Here I have shown two very similar scenes from "off campus" (our horror movie trailer) and the trailer for Halloween 2. Here you can see the final scene which is just before the film name is shown. You can see that the monster is in the shot, attempting to attack the victim, the shot is a POV of the victim and as the shot progresses the monster gets close to the victim until it cuts to the next shot.

These clips are also very useful for comparing the style of the monster, our monster was originally supposed to be a paranormal ghostly monster, but as we progressed through making the trailer he became a slasher monster. Mike Myers (the monster in halloween) is also considered to be a slasher monster so this is very good for comparisons. Here you see that the monster is hooded so you cannot see his face clearly and in this other shot you can see that our monster and Mike Myers both wear masks which is another very common convention when it comes to horror.

One very key convention that we used in our trailer and that we planned to use was the "Final girl", in our trailer we named our final girl Charlie, this is because the name can be used for both boys and girls which connoted towards a masculine feel. A few people thought that the final girl was not as obvious as it could have been, they said that we should add in more scenes of Charlie getting away from the killer. We tried to emphasis the use of the final girl by sticking in a shot of her attempting to escape in her car at the end of the trailer.

Close to the beginning of our trailer we used a POV shot through a gap in a door, looking at the students walking past. This kind of shot is often used in horror films to convince us that there is someone following or spying on the characters. In our shot Charlie (being the final girl and therefore being more aware of the situation) decides to investigate, and then you find that it is simply one of the other characters playing a prank. This emphasises both the use of this shot and also the use of the final girl, everyone is having a laugh and the final girl is taking things seriously.

As a horror trailer, our text for both our titles between shots and the “off campus” text were very important, we had to choose a type of text that would fit our slasher genre, otherwise instead of scaring people; it would put on the wrong mood for the trailer. When we were scrolling through the available fonts in livetype, we found that there were very few horror fonts available. This forced us to use the “bog standard” horror font which at the time we certainly weren’t happy with. However, as our slasher genre strengthened the font stuck and blended in with the rest of the trailer very well in my opinion. The only real problem we had with the creation of the text was the fact that livetype only had 2-3 different fonts that fitted horror which was very annoying, but it did offer us a lot of effects which were very good at making the end product look more professional. Here are some pictures that help to show similarities between our font style compared to other films.

The lighting in our trailer was all (on screen source), we honestly weren’t very worried about lighting when we were creating it, and we had a few problems with a couple of the shots, especially the garage scene, where a night vision option on the cameras would have come in use. Normally I wouldn’t use night vision but there does seem to be an increasing use of night vision shots in the horror genre. There were a few shots that lighting helped with accidentally.This shot is in my eyes very cool! I love how the character below is forced into a silhouette because the light from the garage blinds the camera from seeing him. It gives you a sense of how evil the garage really is and how it relates to the killings that happened there. Here is another shot that worked very well I was debating whether or not to have this shot as my poster because of the amazing way the contrast varies from one side of the gate, and the character, to the other. This shot makes me think that if it was shown to someone who didn’t know anything about it, then they would be confused if she was the killer or not. The huge difference between the light and the dark on the image and the way that it splits right down the middle of the shot is simply perfect, and this also relates to the idea of the final girl becoming scarred during this experience with the monster. In this case the character is half evil and half good, and it’s all just down to the lighting, it’s only now that I’ve realised how influential lighting can be on a situation and I regret that we didn’t think about it more when we were creating the trailer.