In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
Trailer
Poster
My poster is quite unconventional of most posters. Teaser posters are often more daring and more mysterious. For example, the poster for Cloverfield is simply an image of the statue of Liberty with no head, and a date at the bottom.
I tried to make my poster less filmic, and more of arty. There are a few teaser posters that are hand drawn, to give a film a different edge, I conformed to this. I wanted mine to have a slight victorian verisimilitude, or to be a homage to victorian fairground posters or theatrical posters. One poster I've seen which did do this was The Good German. The poster was made to look exactly like a 40's film poster and causes the viewer think, it is a writerly text, rather than readerly. I like it when a film doesn't stop being a film outside of the cinema, with their 40's poster they carry on the transportation effect for the viewer in their everyday lives.
I decided also not to include a tag line. I thought a tagline would make the film seem unreal or unauthentic. I instead did what the film Moulin Rouge! did, which was to have four key words which relate entirely to the film and place them in the poster. Moulin Rouge! Used the words Truth, Beauty, Freedom and Love. I used Duty, Power, Protect and Vengeance.
I did use some conventions however. I used the standard 15 certificate, and added a 'coming soon..' caption. A billing block is also normal to find in a poster, as well the website address. My film isn't big budget so I couldn't simply have a poster with no information, I needed to target my audience quickly and effectively.
The layout of my poster is a very conventional one. Most posters will have the title at the top, the billing block at the bottom, and the actors in the middle. I used this tradition while creating mine.
You could say I have used the conventions of victorian posters to build mine, I researched and studied old victorian posters to get an understanding of what they are like, and took certain aspects and applied them to my own. The borders in mine are highly decorative, which is a given in a victorian poster.
Website
My website is the classic example of a conventional film website. This is probably the most traditional of my three tasks. The layout consists of images around the edge, the title at the top, and the trailer dead in the centre, it is also landscape. This is a very common film website layout. Even the intro video at the beginning is common to have, websites often play the video while the actual website is loading.
^ The website for source code has the exact same layout as mine for example.
A website is multimodal, and I tried to use this to my advantage, for example, after the intro video there is the sound of a crow croaking. Lots of websites use sound effects to create an atmosphere and make a website interactive. I also made mine hypertextual, which is very common. Inspired by other film websites, I added myspace and Facebook links, for the audience to visit.
