Evaluation Question 1 - Cloé

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

Conventions of Psychological Thriller

Perception

• One convention of psychological thrillers we conform to is perception. We do this by displaying the protagonist’s interpretation of the world. 
• The main film that inspired us for this was 'Clean, Shaven' from which we lifted a scene in the library. This had tightly framed shots of the protagonist as he experienced mental trauma, and then was cross cut with long shots of a silent library in which he was banging his head against the books. We felt this was very effective as it put the audience in the shoes of our protagonist before revealing that its all in their head. 
• In our library scene we have similar POV shots of our protagonist having a breakdown and hitting her head against the shelves. This encourages the audience to empathise with our protagonist so they don't take the side of the people in the library judging her. Our blurred shots were inspired by ‘Broadchurch’, a TV series, which has blurred close ups as the protagonist is experiencing a spell of dizziness. We achieved this effect by subtly changing the saturation levels and by making the camera focus, defocus and move towards a set of shelves. The image on the right is taken from our own footage, this blurred shot of our protagonist's hands hitting the shelf is cross cut with close ups of her eyes squinting, this is paired with non diegetic sound of white noise and a high pitched sound that further involves the audience.
• We also show a close up on our protagonist’s face as our antagonist scornfully walks away from her. Using this we managed to display that our protagonist is hurt by our antagonist’s actions and so the audience is getting our protagonist’s interpretation. 

Making changes

• After completing this scene we re-watched it and decided to remove a few things. Firstly the long shot of our protagonist hitting her heads against the shelves seemed more comical than awkward and didn't really fit in with the scene. We therefore moved various shots around so the scene was simply the protagonist having a breakdown and the antagonist judging her. 

Use of mind as location

Initial Ideas

• We also utilise the mind as a location for internal conflict, which is an additional convention. 
• When beginning our journey of making the teaser trailer we were set on one thing which was the use of green scene. This therefore meant we adapted various sections of our trailer to suit this one aspect that we wished to involve in order to give an edge to our trailer. 
• One way we wished to experiment with green screen was by changing the background to more surreal, imaginary locations. When we started off we wished to create her bedroom and then by using chroma keying we wished to set it alight and change the colouring. However this proved to be rather difficult as we needed to bring in various props such as a bed into school. 

Development

• We quickly abandoned the idea of including her bedroom and thought it would be better to create a 'mind palace' for our protagonist that was clearly inside her head. One way we did this was in a medium shot of our protagonist on her laptop. Here we used the green screen to change the background to the antagonist's facebook so the audience could witness what our protagonist was seeing. This encouraged the audience to empathise with our character and encouraged them to realise the trigger of her actions and her worsening condition. After our protagonist has seen a hurtful comment on the antagonist’s Facebook page, she then see her imaginary friend who encourages her to seek revenge and takes on this advice. 
• We also used chroma keying to demonstrate her instability, (e.g protagonist screaming behind a distorted background full of colourful pills.) By doing this we attempt to make our audience understand that our protagonist is haunted by a mental illness and many of the decisions she makes is after talking to her imaginary friend.The image above is taken from our trailer, this is clearly set in her mind as it is surreal. The medium shot of the protagonist in front of a video which has been repeated using the 'titling' effect on Final Cut Pro demonstrates to the audience what is haunting her. However this obsession is explained by the presence of her imaginary friend in the background telling the audience that she is being influenced by her mind and she is no longer stable. 

Conventions of a Teaser Trailer

Equilibrium

• Our media product also mostly conforms to the conventions of a trailer as
  
  we demonstrate a sense of equilibrium (shown through a scene where our protagonist visits a library) before the disequilibrium later on in the trailer (the obvious one being the ending with the antagonist tied up in the attic). 
• Our titles also portray this sense of equilibrium to disequilibrium as the first one says ‘the medication worked’ suggesting things were going smoothly for our protagonist. However by the end the titles become more suspenseful with one being ‘now she haunts the one that hurt her.’ This shows a clear movement from equilibrium to disequilibrium. 

Restricted Narrative

• Secondly we conform to the restricted narratives of trailers. Throughout the trailer we maintain an enigma which is intensified at the end as it could be argued that the audience is never sure what the protagonist is capable of. We ensured that the protagonist wasn’t present in the attic scene where our antagonist was tied up so that the audience wouldn’t be entirely sure the protagonist kidnapped the antagonist. We also wished to leave the audience wondering if the antagonist was going to be murdered in the end so the audience would wish to view the film at the cinema. 

Limited amount of time

• Our limited time frame also demonstrates that we are conforming to the conventions of a teaser trailer as we couldn’t go much over 60 seconds. This meant that we had to select the best, most dramatic parts of the footage so it would be of the best quality. 
• When storyboarding our ideas we decided that including schizophrenic related news clips and sound would largely help in crystallising the plot. Therefore we did this by using a YouTube downloader to obtain the videos and used the splitting tool to get the most relevant parts of the video. 

Memorable ending

• We also conformed to the conventions of trailers as we end powerfully on our
  
  title ‘Unhinged’ ensuring that it will be memorable for the audience. Ensuring the audience remember the title is a main aim as it means that the trailer had a lasting impact and they are more likely to go see the film in the cinema. We do this by flicking it back and forth with a more distorted white on black version as opposed to a black on white version, we then have ‘coming soon’ flash on before leaving an imprint on the screen. So it had a lasting impact we inserted a final cinematic bass sound as our title came up. 

Titles

• We conformed to the convention of having titles throughout our trailer as when studying different teaser trailers we noticed the importance of them in understanding the plot. 
• For our rather complicated plot line we felt it was necessary to involve clear concise titles which explained the situation and matched what was going on in the trailer. 
• Our development process for this was therefore very important as we had to ensure the audience understood the main story. We found this part difficult as we have to come up with 4 very clear sentences that explained our teaser trailer and cleared up confusion.

Deconstructions

Shutter Island

• As part of the research into how we wanted our trailer to look we had to deconstruct various films and trailers. One deconstruction I did was on Shutter Island's trailer. In this trailer almost every shot is followed by a black transition which speed up by the end. I found this extremely effective as it increased the tension and kept the audience on edge. The presence of the black transitions also gave the trailer a structure that we wanted and felt would help in the build up to our climax at the end. 
• We conform to conventions by having a moment of silence before the final jump (being the scream) which we found on other trailers like Shutter Island and Sinister. Both these trailers have a high pitched 'whoosh' sound before silence and then the climax, which we decided to use as it is extremely effective when trying to get the audience to anticipate the final jump. 

Sinister

• "Sinister's" teaser trailer had a similar effect, however the black transitions here weren't introduced until the end. This was seen as more attractive to us as we wished to start on an equilibrium and then end on a climax. Our montage scene near the end helped us in doing this as we cross cut black slides when editing in-between the two second shots. This meant we could go from a rather calm shot of our protagonist in her bedroom to her being tied up in the loft. The black slides meant the audience wouldn’t be expecting the proceeding shots and so we were able to raise the tension this way. 
• When deconstructing Sinister one thing that stood out in the scenes before the final jump was the non diegetic clicking sound that got faster and faster. This was also paired with a shot of a film reel going round and round. We felt this was very effective and so did our adaptation of this however instead of 'clicks' we had cinematic booms and these were paired with black transitions. We then had this sound get faster and faster so the audience was able to anticipate the final jump. 

Conventions of a Poster

• When we first started thinking about the layout and content of our poster we found it useful to deconstruct various other film posters in order to have a grasp on where to begin. Examples of film posters that we deconstructed are 'The Woman in Black' and 'Mama'. These were the most relevant for our genre as the others were more in the fantasy genre. 

The Golden Rule

• We learnt from these posters when creating our own that the main focus of the poster is not meant to be in the centre (e.g. the protagonist's blue eye is slightly off centre). When we first took our image the protagonist and her imaginary friend were in the centre of a landscape image, however we quickly saw the problem with that and by turning it into a portrait image was able to make the characters and title off centre. 

Size and positioning of typography

• When deciding on the layout of our poster we used these examples to give us an idea of how it was meant to look.
• Firstly both the tagline of both these posters are rather small and unnoticeable, however thanks to the golden rule the poster encourages the audience to look around the poster and spend more time studying it. We therefore decided to have a small tagline. We quite liked the layout of the tagline of the 'Woman in Black' as it is rather abstract and surreal which matched our genre. After studying other posters and experimenting with different layouts we decided on one that was similar to this poster. 

Large Title

• Both of these film posters have a bold title which stand out to the audience. We felt that this was definitely necessary for us in order to convey parts of the narrative and to hint at the genre. However when we first came to editing the poster we felt it was difficult to make the title big without making it seem stretched as we had limited space. We kept the poster like the image below and after studying it we experimented with the layout and separated the letters so they were on different lines. This gave the poster a much more surreal edge and made it totally conform to our genre. Additionally now the title was clear and stood out to the audience so we were pleased with the final product. 

Inclusion of Protagonist

• We conformed to the convention of having the protagonist in the poster, similar to the example posters shown above. We then took pictures all of the locations we shot at with our protagonist as the main focus. When creating the poster we had two separate images which we merged together so the protagonist and her imaginary friend were both present in the image. We felt instantly attracted to this image in the loft because we felt the sharp lighting that left areas of the poster in darkness really conformed with the psychological genre. The image on the left is an example of one of our initial ideas for our poster, which we later decided wasn't appropriate as the title was too small. 

Defining the genre

• The genre of both these example film posters are very clear as soon as you see them, our aim was to create the same effect which we felt we conformed to by using a psychological effect within the poster. We did this by including our protagonist's imaginary friend behind her. By having our character's mouth sealed with gaffer tape we were able to immediately portray her schizophrenia and how she is incapable of controlling her actions. We decided this as we wished our audience would sympathise with her rather than see her as the villain in the story. We created the image by using the 'lasso' tool to cut out our protagonist tied to the chair and drag it over to the second image. After removing individual pixels and adding a few shadows the image seemed professional. 

Conventions of a Website

• When first coming up with ideas for our website we studied the previous year's websites and real promotional websites. Looking at these examples helped us understand the conventions of a website and the guidelines we could follow. 

User friendly

• Firstly both these websites were user friendly, this included not having to scroll down, having the trailer play as soon as the user goes onto the website, having all of the necessary information that the user may need and having all the links functioning which both Sinister and The Purge have. We took all of this on board when making our website. However we had difficulty when making our website as the trailer wasn't fitting in-between the two characters on the image. We therefore had to make it much smaller so that it would work on both the macs and the pcs. However it is easy to make the video full screen and it does start as soon as the user goes onto the website therefore we did ensure that our website was user friendly. We also included social networking links and critics comments which made the website user friendly.

Image

• When looking at other websites we noticed that the image often gave hints about the genre and included the protagonist, similar to the poster. For example Sinister is rather low key and has the protagonist in the shot, his expression is quite scared and therefore the genre is clearly conveyed. We chose an image that we felt correctly portrayed our film. For example we chose an image, which included our protagonist and her imaginary friend which reinforced the narrative as the audience gain an insight into the key themes. We altered the lighting and colouring of the image so that it suited the genre as originally the image was too high key as we took the photo in daylight. Once we were happy with our completed image we uploaded it onto the website and added in the additional features of the website. 
• We also added in the psychological effect that helped with getting our genre across as we included a gif which blacked out the face of the imaginary friend in the background. This made the image more surreal and the paranoid expression of the protagonist clearly demonstrated that the character is haunted by their imagination and schizophrenia. This gif also helps to blur the lines between reality and imagination in the trailer and allows the audience to understand that the trailer is rather surreal.