Question 1 - In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Conventional Teaser Trailer

• One minute long

• Establishing the concept and the genre of the film

• Released months before the film or the theatrical trailer 

Teaser trailers are very different from conventional theatrical trailers 

• Two – three minutes long

• More detailed, showing clips from the actual film 

• Precise details of the film - actors, actresses, director, release date 

We looked at the teaser trailer of Batman- The Dark Knight on YouTube, which we believed was a very successful teaser trailer, only being 55 seconds, with a voice over revealing very little about the plot. The only image shown throughout the trailer is the iconic symbol of Batman and no footage from the film.

For us it was important to make sure we stuck to the conventions of a typical teaser trailer, throughout our trailer we do not reveal the storyline, only the genre of psychological thriller.  The scenes included may not even be incorporated into our actual movie, this would add a surprise element to the audience. The Train Spotting teaser trailer is another trailer we found on YouTube that we felt was very effective. 

The clip is not shown throughout the trailer, and we wanted to use and develop this idea so that we could really grasp the brief of creating a conventional teaser trailer, this is similar to our trailer because you would not actually see the girl writing on the wall, like shown in Cause Unknown and if it is shown it would only be very briefly. The reason that we decided to show this in our teaser trailer is because we wanted to reveal the concept of mental illness, for the audience to question what she is doing and why she is doing that. This may generate sympathy for the young girl or in fact the complete opposite it may cause the audience to fear her because her actions are not a social norm.


Representation of the girl 

• Blond hair 

• Blue eyes 

• Young

• White/Pale pink dress 

The way in which we presented the girl was very important because we needed the audience to feel sympathy towards her, she is young, with blond hair and blue eyes and this stereotypically suggests innocence, vulnerability and purity, this was then emphasized with the dress. However, we also wanted the audience to feel uneasy, and potentially fear towards her because although she stereotypically looks this way, she is suffering from a mental illness. We therefore felt it important to make the wall she was writing on dirty and scruffy, making something once clean and pure, dirty, used and discarded.




 

Our trailer challenges media conventions because the majority of the trailer is a time lapse, fragmented by short clips of moving image and then moving image at the end of the trailer. We do not introduce the audience to the character until the end of the trailer, and even then it is very briefly, on top of this we do not have any speech or set up a storyline, only a concept.