Q1: In what ways does your media production use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Throughout this project the end goal was to make three media products; a film, poster and magazine front cover. In the build up to the creation of the media texts an illusion of a media institution needed to be conceived, whether it was an indie or a major. So thus as a group we came up with the group name ScreamCity as we felt the connotations with the word “scream” such as fear, was fitting for the horror genre we was about to enter and the word “city” gave a metaphorical meaning for a company structure.

With the corporate identity done the media products had to appear as authentic. The only way this would have been achieved is if we had followed the everyday conventions embodied in these products, as a group we feel we have achieved this.

TRAILER

The purpose of a movie teaser trailer is to not give away the plot of the film but at the same time give the viewer a concept of what the film is about with the additional function of making the potential audience aware of the film’s release. The successive trailers like theatrical, will trying to influence the potential audience to watch the film unlike the teaser.

So before we started work on our teaser trailer, we did a research into current teaser trailers on the market and it was then that we knew it would be a complex feat to achieve such as the job to create enough of a visual story in a short period of time (30-60 seconds). Due to the digital era we are in, it was the most likely to gain the most audience attention opposed to the print products which meant that more time would have to be dedicated towards it and therefore making it the most difficult of the three products.

MAGAZINE

The creation of the magazine front cover was the second of the media products we tackled. When creating the magazine front cover, as a group, we had a past experience dealing with a magazine project so we all felt competent and decided it was best to stick with the general conventions of a magazine, the most evident – the layout of the front cover.

Although from our textual analyses for movie magazine front covers we learnt that there was variations in magazine presentation, However these variations were not drastic and the basic rules still applied so we were able to extract those elements that would be found in a normal magazine and were able to apply these conventions with our work.

The convention we were able to develop was the design of the masthead, such magazines like Empire have a bold and clear distinct font and usually have a signature colour - Empire have red. We have used the convention of the masthead by making it bold and visible at the top, however we have not got a signature colour instead we have mixed the colours black and white this is an example of how we have developed a convention.

We felt that our target audience/intended target audience for this movie magazine would be regular movie watchers with no particular specific genre this meant that are audience would be mass and not niche. The title “Box Office” keeps the film genre broad and connotes that the magazine will be featuring future successful films that the reader might want to know about.

Even though the movie magazine is not niche we decided to make it a “horror edition”which would specify are audience down for the sole purpose of promoting the film. The colour red can connote many different things. Depending on the situation, it could give the audience a sense of passion, or love. However, in other circumstances it can have much more sinister connotations. We decided to use this convention and therefore chose a red colour scheme for the sinister purpose. The blood splatter coverlines accentuate to the horror theme.

When taking the photographs for the magazine front cover, we all thought very hard about continuity and how the audience would be able to link the front cover to the film. For this reason, we decided to incorporate the mask of the antagonist, this would allow the audience to make a link but still remain unsure about the antagonist/s, generating to hype about the film.

POSTER

The creation of the film poster was the first of the media products we attempted to do; from studying posters in our textual analyses, we agreed that a poster could be the most basic of the products to make, however it does also remain as one of the most vital components to promoting a film.

Prior to the final poster we had a lot of ideas of what we wanted the poster to look like as you can see from the drafts, but as you know a hand drawn image/idea is very hard to replicate on Photoshop so we decided to digitalised the rough drafts and make them into official drafts which can be seen on the blog. This gave us a clearer vision on what the poster could look like and helped us on our final design, there are also similarities between drafts and actual official film posters.

In regards to conventions, we feel as though we followed the general conventions set by film posters, except from the page orientation. Our film poster is a landscape orientation whereas as the conventional posters are portrait.This may have handicapped us but we feel it was a good decision as in the distribution of the film poster most modes of advertising to the general public offer the wide landscape canvas which will give us maximum coverage e.g buses, underground, billboard, cinema windows.

We did however keep to the conventions that would enhance the illusion of authentication and the chances of having an attention grabbing poster such as the film notes appearing at the bottom of the poster, like all official posters we have studied during the coursework, we even included the same steel tongs font used by the media institutions. The position of the film title varies on every poster and is due to preferences but usually the title is low down just above the film notes so again you could say we challenged another convention but the red font colour was notorious in the horror genre and definitely applied with the convention. Similar to most posters our film poster is a medium close up; making the subject appear large and dominate also the prop of a phone reveals a little about the content of the film such as other films may have a weapon. The inclusion of a mask is also a convention that is frequently used giving the feeling of the unknown which would add to the spooky, mysterious fear factor of the poster.

In summary to this question, we would say that there was a mixture in the use, development and challenging of the conventions in our media product which created a unique blend which appeared authentic opposed to a random make up. In regards to that we are happy with how we dealt with developing, challenging and using the conventions on our media products.