Evaluation: In what ways does your product use or challenge forms and conventions of real media products

Now that i have produced all of my work i must evaluate it by looking at a series of questions to help me asses whether or not my products have been successful.

Before producing my trailer, poster and magazine front cover, i researched existing materials from the genre of my choice which was horror, I knew straight away that i wanted to produce a video of some kind because last year all our work was print based so i wanted to improve my skills elsewhere, i narrowed down my options to a music video along with a magazine advertisement and a digipack and the film trailer option along with a magazine front cover and a poster for the film. After narrowing down to two options i looked at what would be most suitable for me, i decided that it would be more suitable for me to choose the film trailer option because i watch more movies than i do listen to music. I then began to research all aspects of horror including the conventions of trailers such as paranormal activity which i analyzed earlier. I noted the following things

• Always set at night time
• Use of sound effects to create suspense and tension e.g. sound building up
• Use of quick editing to create a sense of panic
• Point of view shots

These are some of the things i have tried to recreate in my trailer, i have followed most of the conventions of film trailers, the hardest one to do was to film at night time, the camera i was going to use wasn't very good at filming at night so i had to rethink, i asked if i could borrow a friends camera which had a night vision option. This helped a lot and in the end i think it added to the effect. The blair witch project used night vision cameras. Filming at night on the other camera was impossible because there simply wasn't enough light (obviously), the camera did have a light on the front which was meant to help but at long distances it was useless. I think my use of sound effects helped to make it more scary, the use of heartbeats and woodland ambience and also the screaming, screaming is found in a lot of trailers because it shows the fear someone is going through.

I think my magazine challenges a lot of conventions, mainly because of the amount of information on the front, normally there would be one main story but then little stories on the outside. however, i decided to go against this because i believe it would look to crowded, instead i put some contents down the bottom of the cover where they are not in the way, i personally believe this makes it look a lot cleaner and easier to understand.

My poster challenge one convention of posters because it doesn't include any of the characters on it just a picture of woods with the slogan 'something is out there'. i done this to create unknown and to make the reader guess what the story is about instead of handing it to them. On other horror posters like in the examples i showed before it shows the main villain and what he looks like so its not a surprise when you first see them in the film.