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

After carrying out much research into genre and codes and conventions surrounding movie trailers we chose to use the stereotypical conventions seen in many horror trailers. We decided to do this as we figured that if that is the way most trailers are made then it must be the most effective way of reaching their target audience. We conformed to the typical codes and conventions of horror trailers through use of costume, lighting, sound and through the plotline of the movie.

The costume seen in our trailer may appear to the audience as casual clothing that has had no thought put into it but we have purposely dressed the characters in this way so as they are portrayed to be 'normal' high school students. It is set in a sixth form of your average English high school and therefore we did not want the costume to be a central part to our trailer. Furthermore they were all dressed similarly as it is unknown to the audience that one of the characters is the villain and so we did not want to make it obvious which character this was as it adds to the mystery.

The lighting we used often looked more effective when filming than it did on screen so we ended up editing the lighting quite a lot in post-production. Often there was too much light to give the effect that we needed to make the genre clear to the audience. Therefore on many of the shots we used a brightness decrease tool to dim the lighting and to stick to the codes and conventions of lighting in horror movies.

The sound took a considerable amount of time to get right, we had problems with the software we were using in overlaying the soundtrack and sound effects so as they could be heard at the same time. Through looking at our research we saw that there was rarely times when you just heard sound effects without the soundtrack being heard at all in the background so we had to figure out a way to do this. We used sudden 'bang' sound effects to excite the audience in certain shots, we found that the timing of these sounds was crucial and must fit exactly to the image to be effective. Before much of the sound was added the trailer was much less effective than it is now with the sound added, we found that the sound is a major part in the trailer and that without it, it would not meet the expectations of its audience.