Evaluation 1

In What Ways Do Yours Media Products Use, Develop or Challenge Conventions From Real Media Products?


Our film trailer is very unique in the way we challenge, develop and adopt typical conventions for the psychological thriller trailer. 

One way we challenged a conventions is the way other trailers within this genre usually include a solid amount of dialog in order to allow the viewer to understand what’s happening. However, we felt in our film we do not need speech to explain the storyline. My thought process behind this is that the trailer is meant to make them think about what’s happening without being explicitly told. Then at the end when they hear the news report and everything will fall in place and they will understand what is happening leaving them with a kind of eureka moment.

A way in which we adopt typical conventions within our trailer is through the use of our backing music. Our backing music is used to build the atmosphere around the storyline in our trailer as well as using it as a tool to base our edit around. The way we came up with the idea for our music was when I approached a friend of mine who is doing Music Technology at A-Level. Joe Cleveland (Member of the group) and I sat down with Ben Stacey (Music Tech student) to discuss the needs and wants of the music with our storyboard present. We then continued to work closely with Ben throughout the creative process.

Another way in which we challenged typical conventions is by the way we edited the trailer, more specifically through the use of pace. Although, we have used some conventional editing techniques such as the cut to black to build suspense, we also challenged a major convention. The convention we challenged is pace. This is one of the most important parts of a film trailer as it completely sets the atmosphere and mood for the viewers. This being said we decided to go against the typical fast paced editing style and went for a slow paced edit. The reason for this is due to the nature and maturity of the films content. It is something that should not be glorified or hyped up in which I feel fast paced editing may do.