QUESTION 1: IN WHAT WAYS DOES YOUR MEDIA PRODUCT USE, DEVELOP AND CHALLENGE FORMS AND CONVENTIONS OF REAL MEDIA PRODUCTS?

FILM TRAILER

OBJECTIVES TO ACHIEVEFor this we had to produce a film trailer which could either be a full length trailer or a teaser trailer. For a trailer to be successful a trailer must promote a film which will attract an audiences attention to then see the film upon release.

For this the group I was in decided to come to the conclusion that we would produce a full length trailer. Unlike the a teaser trailer which is short and varies between 30 seconds in length to 1 minute a full length trailer which tend to be a shortest 1:30 to 2:30. Due to us deciding to do a full length trailer it made it easier when researching existing trailers as we new to research into full length trailers. Typical Codes and Conventions of full length trailers include:• Being between 1:30 – 2:30 in length • Featuring star roles from the film • Featuring a soundtrack possibly 2 or more songs• A fair amount of dialog • Accreditation to production companies and distribution companies• Billing block consisting of: Actors, Production Companies etc• Sound effects for violence and fight scenes

From looking at the codes and conventions of a full length trailer it was very helpful when coming to the construction and production of the trailer itself. Firstly we researched existing trailers which helped us in terms of placement of production company accreditation for example the Lionsgate placed towards the start of the trailer helped us in the placement of where to put it for our trailer. Initially we had a trailer which was near 2:30 but found this length didn’t really work with our trailer genre as some of the clips we used were slow paced and not fast paced like some trailers which are this length. The decision to cut down the length of the trailer helped as it meant we could take out clips which were slow in pace and use more upbeat and faster paced clips. Also by listening to SFX used for fight scenes in existing trailers gave a good idea of what to look for and apply to the fight scenes which would used within our fight scenes. For this we googled cinematic SFX as well as going onto YouTube and finding Cinematic SFX such as crashes, hits and whooshes.

Looking at existing billing blocks and actor accreditation also helped as by replicating this within our trailer would give it more of a professional look. Overall by sticking to the codes and convention of a full length trailer helped vastly as it gave us guidelines for producing a trailer which would be similar to existing film trailers.

GENRE CODES AND CONVENTIONSFrom researching the codes and conventions of Action, Crime and Thriller film it gave a good indication of what kind of scenes/clips to feature within our trailer as well as researching into existing trailers of these genres. One main thing which helped was the pacing of the trailers we noticed that trailers of these genres start of slowly and by the middle and end are very fast paced. As well as the use of music which also added to the pace of the trailer. We didn’t want to break the codes and conventions for the trailer as it may of complicated it when coming to the editing but also could have effected the clearness of the storyline shown through the trailer itself. Also seeing Production companies used within existing trailers helped in choosing them for our trailer, we found that Lionsgate was commonly used so we felt they would be ideal.

Aswell as hearing dialog from trailers from actors such as Jason Statham and Ryan Gosling this also helped in the choice of dialog for the trailer itself. And from this we decided to use dialog to explain part of the storyline but also introduce characters.

FILM MAGAZINE

LITTLE WHITE LIESFor the magazine I decided to choose popular British magazine Little White Lies. The magazine has a very individual style and doe feature some basic codes and conventions for the magazine itself which include:• An artistic front cover either painting, hand drawn or graphic design • The front cover features an actor from a film which the issue will be

heavily based on who is facing forward making eye contact with the viewer

• The masthead, date, bar code and price are featured all in a neat white circle at the centre of the cover at the top

• The dimensions for the magazine are different from the typical A4 style magazine

I wanted to make my cover as realistic to the actual Little White Lies cover itself so I researched into the dimensions of the magazine and found out that the size of the magazine was 20cm H x 24.5cm W, this meant I could put these dimensions into the workspace on Photoshop to get this size and work from there. For the logo itself I simply cut it out from an existing magazine and sized it correctly to the size of the cover in Photoshop. I felt I needed to stick to artistic side as this is pretty much the whole of the cover for Little White Lies and felt moving away from this would defeat the object of producing a Little White Lies front cover.

However when it came to image selection I chose not to use the typical pose of facing front on and making eye contact. Instead I chose an image which had the the character (Jason Dyer) looking towards the right. I felt this image really worked well for the cover, however I needed to position the text in the way that it would back up the pose of the character. Initially I had positioned the film title underneath the picture however I felt moving it to the right hand side would be more eye catching to the viewer as that is where the position of the characters eyes were.

In terms of typeface for the cover I had noticed from research that Little White Lies has a very stylised typeface and move away from using back typefaces. For this I looked into the font used for the film Drive which uses a very stylised font which looks like its from the 80s. Also to make this stand out I duplicated the text and off centred one of them and had one in a turquoise and one in a pink colour which made it eye catching but also stick to the artistic style Little White Lies uses. Colouring the text also meant it stood out from the grey background which is a metallic looking background which also was used to indicate the style of film it was.

FILM POSTER

For the film poster to take the main image our group used a DSLR. In terms of putting together the poster I used Adobe Photoshop which would give it a professional finish and possibly would be software used to make actual film posters. To gain inspiration for my poster I researched into posters which related to the same genre as ours. I commonly found bold text with spacing in between was a common style of font used. After seeing the font on the film poster for Blitz (2011) I found the same font and decided to use this for the font for the poster. In terms of body position I really like the pose from the film poster Invictus as I felt it would tie in closely with a piece of dialog used within our trailer and would feature Dyer looking over his shoulder.

Codes and Conventions used for film posters:• Clearly have the film titles name• A tag line somewhere on the poster• A Billing block at the lower half of the poster• The film release date or Coming Soon • Social media links e.g Website and Facebook• An image of a main character • Production companies and Distribution Companies

When I made my film poster I stuck to all of the codes and conventions as I wanted the poster to look as professional as possible, however I did use COMING SOON instead of an actual date which the majority of posters use. I found a font which was very similar to the font they use for the billing block called Steel Tongs which meant I could make a billing block which looks very realistic. I also added award nomintation endorsements which were made within Photoshop and all featured real film festivals again sticking with the codes and conventions as well as producing a realistic film poster.