Lauren's evaluation (part one)

INTRODUCTION

For my project, we created a 'teaser trailer' for a Hollywood spy film. I worked with Racheal Manning and we both contributed equally to the whole project as there was only 2 of us. We both contributed to the shooting of the footage, the editing on Final Cut Express and the work on the Film poster and magazine front cover, using Indesign and Photoshop. Our target audience is 16-25 year olds; the main cinema age range and our secondary target audience is males as our genre is typically pushed towards this gender.

IN WHAT WAYS DOES YOUR MEDIA PRODUCT USE, DEVELOP OR CHALLENGE FORMS AND CONVENTIONS OF REAL MEDIA PRODUCTS?

A teaser trailer, or teaser is a short trailer used to advertise an upcoming movie, game or television series. Teasers, unlike typical theatrical trailers, are usually very short in length, between 30–60 seconds and usually contain little, if any, actual footage from the film. They are usually released long in advance of the film they advertise. Teaser trailers are usually only made for big-budget and popularly themed movies. Their purpose is less to tell the audience about a movie's content than simply to let them know that the movie is coming up in the near future, and to add to the hype of the upcoming release. Teaser trailers are often made while the film is still in production or being edited and as a result they may feature scenes or alternate versions of scenes that are not in the finished film.

A few commonly used conventions within a teaser trailer are:

•  a narrator/voice over,
• sometimes no dialogue,
• short footage of the film but making sure that the whole plot is not revealed.

A movie poster is a poster used to advertise a film. There may be several versions for one film, with variations in regards to size, content and country of production of the poster. It usually contains an image with text, though this has evolved over time from image-free bill posters through to the highly visual digital productions of today.

The text usually contains

• The film title in large lettering and often the names of the main actors.
• It may also include a tag line
• The name of the director, names of characters, the release date, etc.

 Movie posters are displayed inside and on the outside of movie theaters, and elsewhere on the street or in shops. The same images would appear in a film exhibitor's pressbook and may also be used on websites, DVD-packaging, flyers, advertisements in newspapers and magazines, etc.

Our teaser trailer follows nearly all the conventions of a typical teaser trailer, It last for just over 90 seconds to keep the attention of our audience, it has a 'Coming Soon' title like this

to let the audience know that our film will be released soon, but there isn't actually a release date set yet, it also has ambiguous clips were the audience are left not knowing the full storyline, this makes the audience anxious to watch the film. The genre of our teaser trailer is action adventure. Although we did go along the 'spy' sub-genre. We didn't decide to follow this sub genre until we were planning our storyboards, when we realised that our storyline followed conventions of a typical 'spy' film. In our teaser trailer we used most of the conventions you would expect to see in this genre, including,

Expensive cars, Sexy females, Fighting, Chase Scenes, Dramatic tension and Explosions/Bombs.

Within our genre we wanted to do something a little different by have a female protagonist and her being the spy/hero. We wanted to do this because its important to offer the audience something new to interest them but without changing

the conventions to much so that the audience becomes unfamiliar with the genre.
Looking back to the audience feedback, these innovations worked really well as the sexy female protagonist kept them interested and alert. For our ancillary tasks; a film poster and magazine cover, we carried out this same genre by using dark subtle tones on the film poster to convey the mysterious spy image, and on the magazine cover we used

bold fonts and simple layouts to convey the strong independent genre image.

Lauren