Talia A2 media: In what ways doe your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media product?

My A2 media project fiches on creating a marketing campaign that includes a magazine cover and a poster that advertise for the film that I made a teaser trailer for. To ensure that my media texts would advertise my film in the best way I researched into how real films are marketed to get the best response from the consumer.

I looked at a number of existing teaser trailers, from films of all different genres, to give me a a better understanding on how they are structured. I looked at trailers for 'Transformers' and 'The Dictator'. I looked at both the teaser and the theatrical trailers for both and compared the differences.

Teaser trailers

Some of the conventions I found in teaser trailers were: production logos always appear at the beginning of the trailer, if the film is based on a novel then then in the middle of the trailer 'based on the book by...' will appear on the screen. A rough idea of when the film is due to be released and tagline are featured in teaser trailers as well. The way the trailer is edited is also an indication that is it a teaser trailer rather than a full length. As it is only a teaser of what the film is about, fast editing techniques will be used to create tension. Music helps the audience distinguish which genre the film is from as most teaser trailers share the same conventions other than the music used.

Film posters are one of the main ways that a someone can work out which genre a film is from. I looked at a wide range of different posters from all different genres including The Dark Knight Rises, What To Expect When You're Expecting, The Woolf Of Wall Street, The Woman In Black and Titanic. I then annotated them to show their different conventions.

Dark Knight Rises poster annotation.

Titanic poster annotation.

What To Expect When You're Expecting poster annotation.

The Woolf Of Wall Street poster annotation.

Woman In Black poster annotation.

I took all these conventions into account while making my own poster and started looking at posters from the genre my film is from. Since I made a horror film I looked at conventions of posters from Dark Skies, Insidious, Texas Chainsaw Massacre (remake), The Conjuring and 13 Sins.

Dark Skies poster annotation.

Insidious poster annotation.

Texas Chainsaw poster annotation.

The Conjuring poster annotation.

13 Sins poster annotation.

I wanted to use a similar layout to the Insidious poster as I like that it is landscape because it is different from most other film posters, making it stand out and look eye catching. I also copied lots of the conventions found in it too.

- Billing at the bottom of the poster.

- Name of film in the middle of the poster with background image that shows narrative.

- Reviews.

Despite there being two types of film publications, one for mainstream Hollywood films and the other that focuses more on independent films, theres are some conventions that still stay the same. For example, masthead, barcode, issue number and date all stay the same.

Having looked at both mainstream magazines like Empire and Total film and more independent ones I decided to design a cover for a publication similar to Sight And Sound.

Film Publication annotation.