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

"directly addressing the audience with one centre figure"

The first convention we’ve used and developed quite significantly would be the actual convention of the teaser trailer itself – its tease, exposing as little narrative as possible but just enough to whet the audience’s appetite. By making our trailer almost interactive, directly addressing the audience with one centre figure delivering a speech, we’ve taken this enticing the audience into the cinema one step further by actually directly inviting them. Our idea of interrupting broadcast at the beginning, adding the title cards and static were purposely placed to make the trailer look as if it were actually interrupting broadcast and has in a sense interrupted the viewer’s life. We’ve tried to make it seem as real as possible to make it really resonate with the viewer – I think it is always slightly frightening to be directly addressed in a cinema or through a screen – we all feel safe behind our screens and the anonymity they provide us so to be actually addressed is quite startling, if unsettling – we are intruding on their anonymity and therefore lives, and threatening their sense of safety.

"the footage of the Jonestown massacre and the A-bomb"



All the ideas we tried to incorporate into it - the brainwashing and symbols, the footage of the Jonestown massacre and the A –bomb, the shots of technology - we wanted to be especially modern, especially relevant issues to our viewer. We wanted to play on all these threats and fears that society has and the public hold – the threat of terrorism, of cyber terrorism, of technology, of cults etc. By playing on these fears they already have and attempting to hyperbolise them, not only will this make the fear we generate seem all the more real and all the more dangerous, hopefully leaving an imprint of our trailerin the viewer’s mind, it should induce the viewer to think and to contemplate these issues they possibly already worry about. I think this makes our trailer especially eerie and a psychological tease, and perhaps we have created a new convention of a teaser trailer – one that not only entices you to see the movie, but entices you to think? The more the viewer does think and contemplate the issues we bring up, the more likely they are to see the film in the hope of it resolving them. I think we developed this ‘tease’ quite significantly – we revealed no narrative, but just enough to set up the concept of our cult, but could still intrigue and draw in viewers.

"we would have the trailer 'interrupting broadcast' "



I think we definitely challenged the conventions of advertising and marketing our film. We came to look upon it as marketing the actual cult itself, not the film, and went about creating the trailer and the promotional material as we thought a cult might attempting to lure in members and this was where the original idea of the brainwashing video came from. We would have the trailer ‘interrupting broadcast’ to, as I mentioned before, set up this realism and intrude into the viewer’s sense of safety, and then have them addressed by our central figure, a representative of the cult.

"symbol we created for our cult"

Real media products select their audience demographic by featuring certain paradigms to entice a certain viewer and attach certain connotations - within our trailer, we wanted to push this convention and include as many different paradigms as possible leaving the concept completely open for interpretation with so many connotations. We experimented with this idea of subliminal messaging – which if worked, should hopefully subconsciously ingrain itself into the viewer’s mind, but also tried to find a balance between simplicity and chaos. We wanted the brainwashing sequence to be especially fast and almost blinding, but the symbols being shown to be clear and concise and memorable to the eye – we incorporated the symbol we created for our cult as many times as we could and phrases such as ‘We are the answer,’ ‘Join us now’ – short and concise. We again liked this idea of trying to ‘recruit’ members and kept the date, the name and tagline as clear and memorable as we could so it would be kept in the viewer’s mind.

I think our trailer would definitely class as a psychological thriller, if not a technological thriller and I think our trailer succumbed to the conventions of both. We hyped up the paranoia, attempting to play on current fears and threw into question several conspiracy theories – I think it is definitely very psychological and creates a suspense, but one that you consider after you’ve watched the trailer and reflect on it. I suppose the ultimate test of whether a thriller is in fact a thriller is if it actually thrills and I believe ours does, specifically through sound. We layered many different sounds – the music but also bleeps and buzzes and sounds of just technology whirring away, to build up to a peak, that then silences into the voice re-quoting our tagline – we liked the contrast of noise then stopping into the softness of a human voice. Though no particularly sophisticated technology is featured in our trailer, technology is very prevalent throughout it – we incorporated shots of Facebook, Twitter, iPhones, Macs etc. - as is the idea of technology threatening us and our society which is essentially the plot for all techno thrillers.