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

We have used the conventions of a typical horror trailer in that we took advantage of the lack of light that usually features in many trailers. We also used a female cast with a lot of screaming, which is particularly conventional of a teen slasher. These

characteristics of our trailer make it recognisable as a teen slasher

We drew a lot of inspiration from our research of similar texts such as ‘Cabin in the Woods’ and ‘In Fear’. We emulated the aspects of the forest and the concept of ‘being in the middle of nowhere

However, our main aim was to challenge some conventional aspects of teen so we produced a trailer that was refreshing and different from other members of our class and previous teen slasher texts.In order to do this we played on the enigmas and mystery of the narrative. We chose to give as little away as possible in the trailer, as we felt that a lot of trailers we looked at in our research gave too much of the events and disequilibrium of the story away. We didn’t introduce or develop the characters at all and we chose not to begin the trailer with an equilibrium, which is typical of many horror trailers, such as ‘Black Xmas’ and ‘Insidious’.

As for the villain, we only gave an indication that a threat was afoot; we never revealed the identity of the villain or revealed the characters identifying the villain. This is so the audience can feel as though they are experiencing the same fear and confusion as the characters.

The heavy breathing during the camcorder scene of the trailer is particularly effective in giving away only enough to frighten the viewer, but never so much that they are able to identify the villain.

How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts

We continued the theme of mystery by again not revealing too much with both the poster and magazine coverThe ancillary texts do reveal more about the film- they give an indication of the two main protagonists (photographed)

The title of the film connotes horroras ‘screams’ are synonymous with fear, and the fact that they are silenced presents a threat or danger.

We challenged conventional postersWith the use of the black and white

effect for the poster. Typically, posters are in colour but in order to defy these conventions we left colour out, as it gives the poster a creepy look, especially as what is in the background is very difficult to see.

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Before production we sent out a Survey Monkey link to our target audience which was the age range of 6th form. The survey contained questions relevant to our chosen genre which would

help us to identify what the audience wanted and expected from a teen slasher. From this we were able to create a narrative

for our film and shoot an effective trailer that would appeal to our target audience of teenagers and young adults from around

15-22 years old.

These responses in particular helped us establish exactly what was needed in the trailer:

The overall response to the archetypal villain for a teen slasher was a male who is somehow crazed, but most importantly, very mysterious. This meant that

we were able to make the villain in ‘Silent Screams’ a very illusive character with very little to say and little recognition from the camera- we wanted to place as

little focus on his appearance as possible

The general consensus for the ‘last character standing’ was that it should be a female,

particularly the ‘sensible’ one who tends not to have much fun with the rest of the group.

This is what is typical of a teen slasher and what is known as the Carol Clover’s ‘final girl theory’,

which we could then apply to our film

Again, typically for a teen slasher, the group of teenagers who become the victims are female, and our survey

showed us that both males and females enjoy watching a group of teenage girls as

the victims of a teen slasher.

We previewed our trailer to the class and they filled out peer assessment sheets to assess our finished products and blog. This enabled us to see how our

target audience responded to our trailer and therefore consider any improvements that needed to be made

From our class feedback we found that people enjoyed our trailer and felt that the soundtrack worked well and we effectively conveyed the storyline to the audience as they understood what was going on.However, they felt that we should have included more scenes and varying shots and to improve on our trailer, we should make the text bigger and easier to read.

I feel as though we could improve our trailer in many ways; for example, I think it should finish with a fast, shocking image that would leave the audience with a lasting image in their mind. I think with a bigger impact at the end of the trailer, it would be more memorable. I feel as though we could have some more varying shots and scenes in the trailer also, perhaps we could reveal the slasher’s chosen weapon.

How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

For the purposes of collecting ideas and researching what our target audience liked we created an online survey on the Survey Monkey

website and sent it to all female sixth form students via the school e-mail, Outlook. In order to get some male feedback we shared the link

to the survey with some friends outside of school as males are our primary target audience.

As all members of the group were well versed in how Survey Monkey works we found it a simple, quick and effective way of conducting our

audience research. The responses allowed us to model our trailer specifically to suit the audience

ProductionFor the production of the trailer itself, the video camera used was an old model of the Sanyo Xacti digital movie camera. This allowed us to get the handheld effect that we desired for the camcorder scene in particular. Alternatively, when we wanted the camera to be stationary, we placed it on a tripod to film.

When it came to taking pictures, we found that the video camera wasn’t giving us a particularly high quality image. We discovered that the iPhone 5s gave us a far better picture so it was used for thestill images featured on our ancillary texts.

EditingTo edit both our trailer and the ancillary texts we used the Mac computers provided for us. They are simple to work out how to use, however they take a lot of getting used to as they differ greatly from Windows computers. The Macs do have a Windows option, which we used especially for creating out Ancillary texts as we made use of the Photoshop program.

A challenge for us was adapting to the Mac program Final Cut Pro, which none of the group were particularly used to. Our initial lessons allowed us to experiment with the software so when it came to editing we were confident in our abilities to create an effective teen slasher trailer. Once all the group were competent in using Final Cut Pro, we were able to work both as a group and individually to take turns in editing our trailer together and adding sound, transitions and effects.

BloggingTo present our work we used the blogging website Weebly. Originally, we used Wordpress, but found that the blogsite that we preferred was Weebly, and as we had all used it before we were able to work well with it.Any individual work, group work or classwork was uploaded to the site by myself, Kayleigh or Kat.

We had a good experience with Weebly as it’s so easy to use and it has a nice design, the only issue we had was that we had to upload any videos to YouTube first, as we were unable to upload them straight to Weebly, however, this was simple to overcome.