Evaluation

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
In the planning stages of our project, we specified what codes and conventions we wanted to use and what we wanted to experiment with to make our product unique. During this process we identified particular elements of a teaser trailer, of posters and magazines, that we felt are essential to keep them realistic and to convey the genre. To add to this we continued our research in more detail by comparing products of the same genre to ours (e.g. Inception and Buried) and looked for differences. This gave us inspiration to challenge particular elements that could be altered and didn’t need to be specific.

Codes and conventions we used:

• Ø The length of a ‘teaser’ trailer is specific. We researched into time length and found that all teasers were on average around 40 seconds long, therefore we aimed our product to be this length.
  


• Ø At different stages of an advertising campaign, trailers may not have all information. Later trailers will contain actor’s names and directors in addition to the title and release date. We decided to keep our trailer simple with not a lot of detail, therefore only included the tile of the film and the release date. We did this to maintain some mystery around the film and create anticipation.



• Ø At the beginning on any trailer, there is an approval by the Motion Picture Association of America. In order to make our trailer more realistic we felt it would be good to incorporate one at the beginning. To make sure that we are using the correct on to coincide with the rating of the trailer, we researched into other trailers of the same genre and similar content and looked at the one that they used. We paid close attention to Inception as this is similar to our product.

Codes and conventions we developed:

• Ø After putting together the footage we had collected, we found that the trailer was missing something. We felt that it needed more information to create more excitement around the narrative. Therefore we added extra footage to enhance our first draft. This developed the teasers structure as we created flashbacks to encourage a more intense atmosphere.


• Ø The jump cuts made the trailer more interesting and eliminated the flatness.
  

Codes and conventions we challenged:

• Ø A main convention that we changed was the use of less text. We only included the title of the movie and the release date. We did this purposely to keep the trailer a ‘teaser’. We didn’t want to reveal too much information about the story and who was in it. We wanted to maintain some mystery around the movie.