Evaluation Part 1.

In what way does your media product (trailer) use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of read like media products?

There are several aspects in which my media text fits the various conventions of a real media product of the same genre. It is important to do this in order to attract and appease the correct audience e.g. the target audience you have marketed a product for. Thomas Schatz makes this clear in his book "Hollywood Genres" - he mentions that genre is the most powerful force in films as it helped sell the film to the appropriate audience.

Through mixing established conventions and adding our own twist on the conventions of the genre, we felt that "Dead Reckoning" could be a successful trailer and film. It allows the audience to set out clear expectations of the film, all based upon genre. Knowing the genre your text is for and its fan, allows you to follow the conventions of it correctly to fulfil this.

Now, my own media text is part of the Horror genre and it contains various conventions that you expect to be within the Horror genre. These were; Body horror, Quick moving monster and creepy location. An example, of a real movie that contains these aspects is Zombieland. It used alot of good body horror e.g. during the opening Bathroom scene with grotesqe amounts of blood and feaces on the floor after a zombie attack. Also Zomebieland uses quick monsters well, again during the opening few minutes, where the main character is chased across the parkinglot at high speed.

In order to make these conventions have any effect, I had to first research how other real life texts had achieved it. Through this, I could analyse the conventions of real life horror films. So, as seen on my blog, I watched various other trailers from movies such as "Martyrs", "Dawn of The Dead" and "Shaun of the Dead". I mainly watched trailers that reflected the style of “grindhouse” horror that I wanted to do, which are ones that includee a lot of body horror and variants of slow/fast zombies, such as "Grapes of Death" and "The Horde".I then took what I learnt from watch these into my own trailer in order to achieve the correct pacing and implementation of certain conventions to ensure they worked correctly.

Of course, just including these conventions is useless without the correct “auteur” (as written about by Andrew Sarris in his essay “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962”) influences that would enable me to alter and use them in my own unique and original way. For this purpose I chose autuers based around the sub-genre of horror I chose, in this case George A. Romero and Tom Savini were key influences, with their work on "Dawn of the Dead" (1978) and "Day of the Dead" (1985). However, I still wanted my trailer to be distinctive, for example - in my trailer, I took the premise of "vomiting zombies" (briefly present in City of the Dead) but instead of just plain vomit, I altered it so it was a dark blue/dark grey colour, so that it had a sticking point that people would remember.

Through mixing established conventions and adding our own twist on the conventions of the genre, we felt that "Dead Reckoning" could be a successful trailer and film.