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

For our media project, we created a teaser trailer, a poster and a website. The product we made is called ‘Twisted Truth’ and is of the sub genre Psychological Horror. When we decided we wanted to create a psychological horror and looked into the codes and conventions of previous films. Looking at how psychological horror has changed over time was fascinating and we wanted to make sure our product was as modern as possible. We researched films that were psychological horrors and looked at the different ideas that directors had thought of. Look at Deconstructions for more of our research into previous pyschological horror films. Obviously wanting to grab the attention of the audience from the teaser, we did not want to give anything away so they would want to find out more about the film and see it when it is complete. Our initial idea has been adapted and changed a huge amount as our primary research influenced us a lot.


Trailer

Sound
As we were producing a psychological horror, the sound was very important as we wanted to build a lot of tension and draw the attention of our target audience from the beginning so they would want to watch the whole trailer. Codes and conventions of horror films usually include slow eerie music to start and then fast pace music to increase the pace of the trailer and wanted to use these conventions as they are well known and people would know when the trailer starts what kind of film and genre it is. We didn’t include any dialogue because we didn’t want to give too much away in our trailer and wanted to leave our audience guessing because then they would want to research it and see what it would be about. However, we did include a scream that we found on a free download website and edited it to fit in with our trailer.

Mise en scene
The mise en scene was very important because we had to make sure it looked like a horror film for it to be successful. The conventions we had to use was dark lighting, dark hair for our main character to be dark and mysterious, colours such as red to represent blood and danger etc. We dressed our protagonist in a white baggy top and grey leggings and this was to make her come across as someone who didn’t bother about their looks and had other worries on her mind.

Editing
The editing was another important factor because we wanted the editing to be conventional of the psychological horror genre. We looked at different teaser trailers to see the editing techniques and the use of shots such as Hostel and Gothika. When deconstructing them we noticed there was a lot of anchorage included in the trailers and there were a lot of different cuts for shots so most clips are extremely short – no longer than 2 or 3 seconds. We also used a range of different effects such as fastening up the speed of the shot and different colours and contrast e.g. black and white.

As we didn’t have any dialogue giving away any clues as to what the narrative is, we used anchorage at the beginning to entice the audience and make them want to watch the film as they were left guessing. The title we came up with, ‘Twisted Truth’ was developed from our ideas of our trailer having a twist at the end and as it was a psychological horror, we wanted to have a mystery throughout that will leave people guessing after they have seen the trailer. It also contradicts itself, the audience may be confused by the idea of what it perceives e.g. the truth is being twisted into a lie or the truth is not what is expected.


Theories
Our trailer links with Barthes Enigma code as throughout the trailer there is a mystery of what is happening. The narrative gives clues about our protagonist and establishes meanings and functions which then resolves the mysteries that our audience is feeling. Our teaser trailer is ‘open’ in terms of being able to interpret the shots in many different ways. It also links with Todorov’s theory but challenges it because it starts and ends with disequilibrium and his theory is that the disequilibrium is in the middle.


Deconstructions
The films, trailers, posters and websites we deconstructed were extremely useful when look at what conventions were typical and which ones we could afford to use or not. Look at Deconstructions for in depth deconstructons.


Twisted Pictures
The institution we used was ‘Twisted Pictures’ which coincidently sounded similar to our title. This institution has been known to produce films that are in the horror genre such as ‘Saw’ and ‘Dead Silence’. When we were researching different institutions, we wanted one that had created films in the past that were very popular and ‘Saw’ instantly stood out to us. We looked at the trailers for ‘Dead Silence’ and incorporated some conventions into our own product such as blink shots (shots that only last for 1 second with black in-between as if someone is blinking).

Institution logo used in our trailer, we felt it fit with the rest of our teaser trailer

Our chosen font and title shown at the end of trailer fits with the logo of our chosen institution

A film poster of the film 'Dead Silence' produced by Twisted Pictures

Poster

We found from poster research that the codes and conventions were:
• gothic colours (e.g. red, black and white)
• an image representing darkness, blood, horror
• a title that stands out against a background
• a short and simple but effective catch phrase

Research of horror posters inspired our own

An example of a previous poster using the colours red and black

This poster is effective as it used the colours red and black and a small image to intrigue the audience.

Colours
The colours we used for our poster were very typical of the horror genre which were black red and a little bit of white for text. The handprint stands out as it is covering most of the page and people’s eyes are automatically drawn to it due to the red colour of it. The hand is very dominating, which suggests the person whose handprint it is could be dominating. The handprint was iconic as there were shots of the protagonists hands when they had blood on and she was using them in most of our shots e.g. crawling, touching something such as a window or a wall. This is the reason we used the handprint as the main focus of the poster. We found some previous film poster that had handprints on them and the poster from ‘Sufferance’ gave us inspiration to use blood when representing her hands.

Anchorage
Anchorage was important on the poster because we wanted it to stand out and be short enough for the audience to ask themselves questions. Our catch phrase was ‘Everyone has secrets’ which leads the audience to asking themselves who has secrets and what they have done. We researched fonts that would stand out to the audience and creep them out and our final chosen font for the poster fit with the rest of the design and met the codes and convetions of a horror poster.

Images
We had a range of ideas that we could use as a main image for our poster. When we were filming we decided to take pictures as our protagonist was in character and had her costume on. Our first idea was having bloody handprints on a wall but we decided this was too similar to another poster we had previously seen. Another idea we had was a reflection of our protagonist in the mirror where her reflection expression was different to her actual expression which gave a hint to the audience she was had psychological problems.

One of the images taken of our protagonist in her costume, using bloody handprints on her t-shirt

Webiste

Looking at other website of horror films, we wanted to use obvious conventions to promote our film and have audience relate to the products we were creating. Technology is developing extremely fast and using a website to advertise our film was the best way to promote it as more people are getting familiar with digital technology everyday. On our website we were able to promote our trailer, information about the film and our widgets to social networking sites that were also promoting our product. The colours on the website were black and red so it connected with our genre and we incorporated the handprint background to link the website with our poster.

We were inspired by the official Gothika webstie: http://gothikamovie.warnerbros.com/