In what ways does your media product use forms and conventions of real media products?
Our trailer uses postmodernism devises as we have created a hyper reality where our main character is transported to an alternate world. Which coincides with 'there is no truth' in which it questions what is reality. Postmodernism focuses mainly on narrative and in our trailer we have used Todorov's theory, in the plot of our film, which is in 5 stages. Stage 1: equilibrium, where everything is calm and normal, in our film this is where all the characters are camping sitting outside their tent socialising and laughing together. Stage 2: disequilibrium, this is where the stability is disrupted and in our film the calm state is disrupted by a thunderstorm. Stage 3: recognition, this is where the disruption is recognised, for our film this is where the main character wakes up in the alternate reality in her Nans house. Stage 4: Action, this is where action takes place that is to fight against the disruption in our film this is when the main character searches for her brother and they come together to fight against the government. Stage 5: Restoration, this is where things go back to being calm and normal in our film this is where the siblings both make it out of the alternate world and back into the real world.
Our media product uses forms and conventions of real media texts in many aspects. one way in which our media product uses forms and conventions would be the generic length for a trailer which range from 1 - 3 minutes, ours lasts for 2 and a half minutes, trailers are usually only a short duration because they are there to tease the audience and they cant give away too much of the whole film otherwise the audience wont feel the need to go out and spend money to watch the whole film. another convention of a trailer we used would be that its not in chronological order, we stuck by this convention as we felt that if we made our trailer in chronological order it would no longer be a trailer but a short film. Before creating our trailer I researched into some of the forms and conventions of trailers, my research can be seen in the prezi below.
We have used stereotypical costumes for our characters so they can be easily identifiable to the audience. We chose to use generic clothing and props for the characters so that the audience could understand each character easily as we felt that the postmodern aspect of the alternate world was enough to add to the uniqueness of the film, we wanted there to still be a sense of realism in the alternate world and we did this by keeping stereotypical characters that an audience could identify with such as your stereotypical teenager. Our main character was dressed in regular clothing that you would see any normal teenager in. For the government in the alternate world we dressed them all in black this is typical of other real media texts where the antagonists are usually dressed all in dark colours, to keep the mystery further of the antagonist we never showed their face we got this idea from the TV show Pretty Little Liars, we liked the fact that when the audience don't know who a character is completely they have to keep watching because they want to find out hence we felt this would be a good way of keeping the audience interested and engaged.
The narrative theorist Vladimir Propp states that there are 7 specific character types in all texts and in our trailer we use 4 of these character types: 1, being the main character Lucy who is the hero as she is the good person that the audience instantly like. 2, being the male main character who acts as the helper he is seen as almost a side kick to the min character. 3, being the Nan of the main character she is seen as the donor she is an older wiser character who offers advice to the hero. 4, being the government, they are the villains in the film as they are trying to stop the siblings from finding each other, the audience see these as a danger and a threat.
Click on the image above to see my costume and research prezi where I have said what we were planning on using for our trailer.
