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

Teaser trailers are important in terms of advertising and marketing when creating a new film. They are created by the distribution companies to encourage the potential target audience to see the film. Therefore, it is important to make it suitable for the genre, for example, if it's a horror trailer, it's quite important to add things that will make it scary or mysterious to watch. It also needs to give you a flavour of the plot, and some of the main characters, although it shouldn't give too much away. When creating our trailer, it was important to try and stick to the main conventions of a horror trailer and to make sure it would persuade the audience to come and watch it. Conveying a sense of mystery is important in this.

Teaser trailers are very important in making money, as persuading people to come and see it makes more money, it should not only inform people of the latest new film but should persuade people to come and see it. After all, much of the time, the only way you hear about a new movie is from the trailer so it needs to be good.

The images to the left show nine screen shots of our final teaser trailer along with nine similar shots from other various horror trailers. The first shots on each of the posters (labelled 1) were towards the beginning of the appropriate trailers and established the setting of the horror trailer. Our trailer started off light which soon then turned to darkness, the doorway of our house looks a whole lot scarier in the dark even though we had just seen a similar thing in the light which appeared to be Innocent. This is similar to the shot (labelled 2) in Hostel, something which under a different light or a different angle may appear to be Innocent is in fact something completely different and quite scary. When studying various trailers, we found that it is always important to include shots of the characters looking scared (often as a close-up) to terrify the audience and show emotion. Hence the shot on each poster labelled 3. Shots 4 and 5 on each poster signified clever camera movement, sometimes it is appropriate to pan or to include a handheld camera shot to convey the scariness of the situation. Shot 6 signifies inter-titles are often used to help the narrative along in the trailer and is almost crucial in a horror trailer to help understand the plot and to give a strong suggestion of the sub-genre of the film. The shots labelled 7 are stills of a fast compilation of shots in the trailer. It is important that a horror trailer goes through at least one pacy bit to build up suspense often to a climax of a big scary shot or loud noise. The last two shots (labelled 8) on their own don't look as if they should belong in a horror trailer. Sometimes it is good to include well lit shots that don't seem necessarily scary at first glance, this often helps to build a sense of mystery or innocence.

In our trailer we attempted to make our sound as scary as possible. We decided not to use any dialogue in the trailer but simply inter-titles to get the point across. This is similar to typical horror trailers because a lot of the time people's voices make the trailer a lot less scary and comforts you even though there may be terrible murders going on in the background! We developed our sounds in Garageband and a substantial amount of our sound was created by a pretend keyboard, although this doesn't seem particularly scary to read, if it is played in the right way, it can create tension and build the trailer to a climax. There is also undertones of a solid sound underneath the trailer which ensured that there were no silent moments in the trailer as this would not be sticking by the conventions of normal trailers. And of course, the scream - we had to include a scream in our trailer, most horror trailers that we have looked at in class included someone screaming, often female and occasionally a very short period of silence for effect, however we kept with a solid undertone after the scream to ensure that people didn't think it was all over!