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

My media product uses the forms and conventions of a real media product as it incorporates a main male protagonist, whether it be male or female pretty much every film will feature a main hero character that the film will revolve around and there's no difference in my product. This character will often have something that has gone wrong and he needs to fix it for example Robert Neville from I am legend is a very similar character to mine of Matt Duke as they have both lost their families and are trying to survive a zombie outbreak. Another character shown in the teaser trailer is the news reporter, i got this idea from the 2004 remake of Dawn of the dead, it has a scene with the news reporter talking about the zombie attack and warning people to stay inside, I thought this would be an subtle way of helping show a bit of the narrative with out giving everything away. This developed conventions as often trailers will have a voice over helping explain what is happening, whereas mine tried not to make it completely obvious but helped the audience realise what is happening. There are many general horror conventions that are seen in lots of horror films, my teaser trailer features a few, for example the setting is quite stereotypical to horror with a deserted eerie looking place like a forest. My trailer also shows the use of weapons which are often associated with action/horror films.

My magazine cover uses alot of conventions from real covers, i based my cover largely around the layout of a Total Film magazine as you can see from the two pictures below (right is real product). They have a lot of things in common like having a main figure that has the centre of attention with everything else based around him. The placement of titles and smaller details like the bar code and price are all in similar places. I challenged the conventions though as normally the magazines will feature the hero on the front cover, but i featured one of the zombies, complete with editing.

I tried to stick to alot of the more general conventions that are expected with a teaser trailer. Because teaser trailers are released a long time before the film actually releases, the teaser trailer should try and capture the audience and interest them further so when the film does come out they remember it and want to watch it. I have tried to do this by not giving everything away; when the audience watches my trailer without knowing anything about the film, they should hopefully wonder what it is causing these disappearances and want to find out, therefore interesting them further. However I did challenge some conventions, often these trailers will be all out action trying to really grip the audience however with mine to begin with it starts quite artistic and just has shots of a person doing things that you would generally do when you wake up in the morning and get ready for the day. There is no speech and is quite quiet apart from the noise from the actions, this leaves the audiences quite confused to whats actually going on and what its advertising, and should hopefully incense them into wondering what its actually about and become interested.

With alot of film posters, generally they will be made very bright so they stand out from far away so people will notice them. I've challenged this convention as my poster is extremely dark, and the main picture is not completely visible. I did this for two reasons, the first was because I thought it would look different from the average posters you see and would look aesthetically pleasing, the second was because i thought the dark colours will represent to the audience that it will be a dark film, and these dark colours show the conventions of a horror film. However without the dark colours of the poster, it would follow the general conventions of a film poster by featuring a main image that has something to do with the film, a title, a date and credits. There are alot more things that are expected to be on a poster normally like taglines or ratings from newspapers but I thought I would keep it simple.  Below my poster is compared next to other posters and instantly it does look different because of the colour differences, but apart from that it does feature alot of similar conventions.