Evaluation Question 1

In what ways does your media products use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products.

Our media product supports many of the conventions of professional media products. The reason for this is because while we where filming, we kept all the specific rules in mind and made sure we didn't break any rules.
For example the 180 degree rule when we are filming, we have many shots throughout our media piece where we panned the camera and when doing that it is very easy to break the 180 degree rule.
We found ourselves filming scenes many times over, this was not always because we messed up the filming, sometimes the characters minor facial expressions were not suited for the scene, the scene was instigating horror but their facial expressions suggested otherwise, to keep consistency and the horror theme going we had to re film and make sure everyone knew the how they had to act specifically.

One thing that we have done is kept our whole media production in black and white, from the people who have viewed it we have had the same feedback. we are fully aware how this may challenge the conventions of a real horror trailer. However there are two ways to look at this, you can look at it in the form of consistency, in that sense we've stuck to the book and ket the whole horror trailer in black and white. However when you look at other horror trailers they are never all in black and white, they may be mostly but there is always a scene that has colour and this adds effect. The one issue we had with filming was that the times we got together to film tended to be during the day, so the scenes we did film had to be darkened and when using the Mac computer and darkening the scenes, it did not always look to good when they where darkened so we had to play about with the balance of the colour, so by making them black and white and then messing around with the darkness of the scene we where able to come up with the darkness we needed, that is then when we applied it to everything because at the time it was consistency that we where looking to achieve.

Another way me have challenged the conventions of a real media products is the monologue, we don't have much throughout our piece. This was the case last year also, we personally feel that we are able to achieve quite a professional piece without having much monologue. When our media piece was viewed by our teacher this is one of the first thing they picked up on immediately which is possible a floor in the piece. So we have made plans to do some voice over however not fully decided as to whether we are going to or not. One thing which i personally noticed was how we act when we are in front of the camera, we pay generous amounts of attention to how we act to be able to give as much detail away as we can through our actions, this is a possibility as to why we don't intend to have much monologue in our finished media product.
For example one of things we included was a P.O.V shot, and when we filmed this and reviewed it on the Mac computers it was obvious due to the shadow on the floor that the camera was in hand however we re filmed the scene and although in the second take we filmed it exactly the same however you could not fully tell that it was a camera in hand it looked as if the character was having a drink, which then brings us onto the other idea behind the filming, the characters have been previously drinking, instead of having monologue to show this we show it through their actions. In the media piece it is shown through the silly mistakes and the dopiness that the characters portray, for example going to the wrong vehicle, walking in a strange slurry manner. Also the scene where the two main character enter the vehicle, one of them instantly shuts his eyes in the car before the shock of something in the back seat scares them back out.

Another way we may have challenged the conventions of a typical horror trailer is with some of the scenes mentioned int he previous paragraph, although it is a horror trailer and the intention is to scare yet interest an audience, however the part where the two main characters are portraying that they are under the influence brings an element of comedy, because they go to the wrong car and then have a tug for the car keys and this comes across as quite funny because they aren't sober and they are not aware. this may challenge the conventions of a professional media product however i personally think it may be a good thing because it shows something slightly different and bending the conventions is not seen as a bad thing by us a group.

What may be seen as a flaw in our product as previously mentioned is we do not have enough monologue however we do try and make up for that with the filming. i can only be accounted for so much however because the narrative and the story need to come together and as we have not paid full attention to monologue we may have to add parts to make up and explain in our piece more of the story line, in the first few draughts of our media piece it was pretty obvious to ourselves and the people who viewed it that the story was not fully clear, and we did more filming to help clarify what the story was about however as i said there is only so much filming you can do for a trailer that is going to last roughly 2 minutes.