Evaluation Question 1: In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Magazine front covers often have a barcode, the issue date and the price. Our magazine cover happens to have each of these conventions. Magazines also feature cover lines, which we have definitely placed on the left and right-hand side of our front cover, in bold red font. Our front cover also has the mashead ‘TOTAL FILM’ across the top of the page, with an image of the main character’s head covering a few of the letters. This is similar to other ‘TOTAL FILM’ magazine front covers. All of the text on this magazine has a black stroke around it. This develops the conventions of a normal magazine. Normal magazines hardly put a stroke around their text. We decided to do something different because this would make the front cover stand out to the target audience who happen to be teenagers. Most of the text is in capital letters; this develops the conventions of a magazine cover. Often only the masthead and cover lines are in capital letters, nothing else. The reason we decided to keep the text in capital letters is because it stands out against the grey background and therefore would attract many people if placed on a shelf of a store. It is also easier to read. In magazines the front cover always uses simple colours so we decided to use a blend of red, black and white as my colour scheme. They are associated with the superhero theme often as well, which is a good thing because our film is a superhero film.




Film posters often have the image of the main character in the middle. We have followed this convention. Our character has two identities; he is a superhero ‘The Talon’ as well as an ordinary teenage boy. We decided to use an image of him as an ordinary teenage boy.  Our film poster has this image inside the first initial of his superhero name, ‘T’, and this is placed in the middle of our poster. The image of our main character is very different than images that are regularly on film posters. It looks as if our character has been painted into the letter ‘T’, it looks very artistic. This challenges the conventions of film posters as they generally have a very large and photographic image of the main character in the middle of the poster. We decided to use an image of him as an ordinary teenage boy instead of him as a superhero because we wanted to show the side of our character that our target audience, teenagers, can relate to. Instead of just using this image, we thought we still needed to show the audience the other side of our character, that’s when we decided to place the image inside the letter ‘T’. We constructed this letter ‘T’ out of masking tape and stuck it onto what happens to be ‘The Talon’s’ cape. As well as showing the audience his identities, we wanted to show the audience our character’s personality, he is very nerdy, meek-a pretty lame superhero. This is why we placed the image of our character inside the image of the ‘T’, the masking tape which is falling of the cape, to make it more clear that ‘The Talon’ is a lame superhero- he can’t even stick the letter ‘T’ onto his cape properly. Most film posters usually have the logo of the film on it, either at the top or bottom. We have decided to place the logo of the film at the bottom of the poster as well as the films release date and a website to find out more information about the film. We also made visible, the scratches that ‘The Talon’ makes when using his weapon-the claw-which he made out of cardboard, masking tape and plastic forks.


At the beginning of our Superhero movie trailer the film production logo is displayed. This is evident in many other film trailers such as the film trailer for Captain America- The First Avenger and the film trailer for The Dark Knight Rises.



Most film trailers feature voice-overs to help the audience understand the narrative. Some trailers use the main character as a voice-over to help convey the narrative; and this creates a connection with the audience and the protagonist as they can understand how they feel, and by what they say you can sometimes understand the character; and possibly sometimes relate to the character. We decided not to do this but instead use music to drive the narrative of our film, and we felt that the music we chose would help the audience to understand how he feels and what his motives are. Music is also essential in trailers as it can suggest the genre, style and plot of the film. Editing of the trailer is created specifically to reinforce the narrative, and to help the audience understand the central plot of the film, the clips on a film trailer are sometimes not in the order they're seen in the film and that is because the clips help convey the story. Editing includes the use of fast cuts to show different parts of the film within a short amount of time. This holds the audience’s attention and keeps them entertained. Our trailer follows this convention. The fast cuts in are trailer are driven by the music which we used, for example, our trailer begins with slow music in the background and then the first shot fades in slowly, but as soon as the music speeds up more fast cuts are shown on screen for a shorter amount of time.

Another key convention of film trailers are the use of captions. This gives the audience more information about the film, including the stars this is done purely to attract the audience; especially if there are big stars in the film it makes the audience want to go and see them in the film. We also followed this convention.




Other texts in trailers usually give information about the producers/directors/cast, tagline, the title and release date which are often shown at the end of the trailer. We didn’t put in any text about the director or producer of the film, but we did mention the cast in our film.




We put in the film logo towards the end of the trailer.



We didn't put a tagline in our trailer but we did mention the release date and film website,‘www.facebook.com/thetalon’, for the audience to go onto for more information about our film.




The styles of text in trailers are different according to the genre of film, the tone that is going to be used in the film and it is usually accompanied by a musical beat.  We decided to use bold text because the film has a lot of action, and it is also a comedy so the fact that we are using such serious text adds irony to the trailer and the film is also all about an ordinary boy trying to be a superhero and often superheroes are described as being bold and he is definitely brave to try and take on the role of a superhero.