Evaluation Question 1 - Rebecca

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

Throughout the development stages of our teaser trailer, poster and website, we had to research thoroughly into the various conventions of our genre, psychological thriller.

Teaser Trailer
'Enter the Void' Deconstruction
Firstly, we carried out many deconstructions on films from the same or similar genre, focusing on picking out what the conventions of our genre were. One deconstruction I found to be quite a large source of inspiration for us, was 'Enter the Void'. In my deconstruction of this, a prominent feature I focused on was the use of flashbacks throughout the film, one point really stood out to me, where the flashbacks were used in a montage sequence, quickly showing various parts of the protagonist's earlier life. I believe that this was an inspiration we used in our teaser trailer, because during the end part of our trailer, we have edited together a montage sequence, including flashbacks from earlier in our film's narrative and increase the pace of the montage rapidly.

'Girl Interrupted'
Deciding to focus on mental illnesses
Since our teaser trailer focuses on a character with schizophrenia, we also had to research films that covered characters will mental illnesses. For this, I deconstructed the trailer of the film 'Girl Interrupted'. While deconstructing this trailer, I noticed how those with mental illness were not treated with the same respect as 'normal' characters, and they seemed to adopt a childish nature, as can be seen with the character Lisa.

Deconstruction
Throughout the film's trailer, we get a huge sense of the prejudice against the people inside the mental hospital, they are not treated like normal human beings.

"Patients do not seem to take their time at the facility very seriously and this is shown by the introduction of Lisa, who is wearing a bright yellow shirt and has a cat puppet. This shows a very childish nature, especially with the addition of her diegetic dialogue "Look at me!" Wanting attention and playing with the puppet, however the mise en scene suggests that she is probably happy if not excitable"

"The typography used when Susanna has arrived is very important, as the word 'Claymoore' is in red capital letters, which could suggest to outsiders there is some sense of danger, however the underlying message could be that the staff are taking action to help those inside"
"Linear narrative is used heavily at the end of the trailer, helping to increase the pace and add a little suspense just so that the viewer wants to find out more of the narrative."
Implementing conventions into our trailer
We tried to incorporate this into our teaser trailer, and this helped us conform to the prejudice representation used in films of those within films. From the very beginning of our trailer, we see how our protagonist is judged immediately by those around her, prompting her to watch the character who judged, and try to get some kind of closure, while battling her mental illness alone, which only makes the situation worse. This challenges the convention we saw used in 'Girl Interrupted', where all the characters in the trailer that have mental illnesses stick together and help each other through whatever is thrown at them.

Instead in our trailer we highlight to the extreme how some people with mental illnesses can be isolated, thus leading them to do things they seem to have no control over, in our case kidnapping the girl who judged her. It shows how when left completely isolated, it can feel like there is no way, only allowing themselves to become overwhelmed with negative thoughts, which we represent through an imaginary friend.

Website

As part of creating our website, we had to research the best kind of layouts for a promotional website and also what content should be included on it. During this research, we looked at other A2 Media promotional websites, and looked at what was good and bad about each of them. From this research, I found that the conventions of websites were to make the genre of the film obvious straight away, often using the background image and typography to achieve this.

Conventions of film websites appropriate to our genre
- Genre suitability
- Suitable for target audience
- Embedded teaser trailer, starts playing automatically
- Clear title of film
- Suitable font colours, and link colours
- Social network links
- User friendly
 - Critics reviews

Deconstruction of 'Brutal Justice' Website

• This website is suitable for the genre because it becomes clear immediately it is in the horror genre. This is made clear by the background - an image of a woods in grey and white, looking very isolated      and appears scary. The tagline also fits into the horror genre, "Some kidnap to protect... They kidnapped for revenge" as it suggests there is a victim and a threat, possibly a human or creature, until you watch the trailer it is unclear.
• The teaser trailer is embedded well and starts as soon as the webpage loads, however, unless you make it full screen the trailer plays in a very small box which could make it hard to see some of the details of the trailer.
• The social links, despite being very large are all useful and links to the main sites, such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, there is also a downloads page making the website interactive.
• The overall colour scheme works well, as it helps enforce the horror genre and makes it seem quite creepy. The grey background allows the red text to appear quite bold which encourages the viewer to click around the website and find out more. 

Development
We developed on this convention by using a background that we think makes the genre clear, as we see our protagonist looking back towards her imaginary friend, who is the source of much of her confusion and violent actions. Another convention of websites was to feature the actual teaser trailer embedded somewhere on the web page, and to have it play automatically once the page has loaded. We have conformed to this convention, as it it vital we have this content on our web page, because it links our promotional products together.


Poster

Research
A large part of the poster, and the website and trailer is typography, and before we could start designing any of our own typography any of these, especially the poster, we had to research what was already out there. From the posters I found that the typography for the different elements of the poster such as the title and tag line are largely the same, but with small differences. We conformed to this idea, and chose very similar looking fonts but with similar effects applied in Photoshop so that they link together nicely.  We found that most of the posters used quite dark colours with a bold contrast, something we took on board with our poster by using a dark location for the photo shoot.

Deconstruction of 'The Woman In Black'

• Limited colour scheme
• Dominant eye in centre of the poster, drawing audience's attention here
• Web address in bold at the bottom of the poster
• Typography in capitol letters
• Tagline links to dominant image
• Costume appropriate for time. 

Development
A common convention of the posters we examined was that the tag line is always a lot smaller than the main title, so we conformed to this convention, making it much smaller and ensuring that the title is what grabs the audience in. In addition to this, the majority of posters have the protagonist's face present on the poster, and this is the dominant feature. We conformed to this idea mostly, however we decided to have two faces, both our protagonist and her imaginary friend edited in, this would be the dominant of our poster, and conforms to the dominant feature linking to the tagline. We thought that because this was slightly different from the normal conventions it would grab our audience as they'd be intrigued to find out why there were two identical people on the poster.