What I Found...

While studying ‘advertising’ in new films, I tried to research and look for conventions of a typical horror trailer.

Some of the things that seemed common in most of the horror trailers that I watched, were that they all lasted 1-3 minutes (depending on the type of advert, e.g. a quick short one to grab viewers attention - mainly shown on TV, or a longer one - giving more information, tends to be shown in a cinema). They also tends to be around 100 cuts, given pleasure (from the conventions of the genre) and also creating suspense, this is used through enigma codes and makes the audience asks questions, who? Why are they killing?…

Adverts tend to contain the distributor and the production’s logo and sometimes a unique selling point. For example, the USP in scream was the director, Wes Craven who was famous for his ‘Nightmare on Elm Street’. Trailers have a series of quick and exciting sequences that have been extracted from the film itself that are full of suspense. The main purpose is to get the targeted audience to watch the film therefore the advert has to be ‘colorful and interesting’ and edited together as ‘bait’ (Lasky)

The ad will also set up a situation and leave the viewer wanting more. It will contain quick action shots, sometimes of the weapons showing the intended audience that it is promising ‘Blood’. This therefore promises audience repetition of known genre pleasures, for example in horror films, the trailer would be what is expected of that particular genre e.g. darkness, suspenseful music, blood, weapons and murder etc.
Trailers aim to make the viewer want to see the film, but give little of the plot or story-line away.

Researching Adverts

For our coursework, we are doing a TV ad. Where better to research adverts than Internet Movie Data Base? (IMDB)

During one media lesson, I typed in horror movie's (as this is our genre) and watched plenty. I wanted to spot trends in them to see if I could pick out any conventions that may be used.

The films that I watched included...
* Friday 13th
* The Grudge
* Drag me to hell
* Halloween
* The Ring
* Nightmare of Elm Street
* Texas Chainsaw massacre
* Alien
* My Bloody Valentine.

I took a mix of new and classic horror films. This was to create variety, however, me and my partner have decided on a new release horror film so will mainly be studying these.

Research on 'Gorezone'

Andy Maquade came into a media lesson and explained all about his work at 'GorZone', we found this very interesting and helpful, especially the contents of the magazine, showing ads which we can study.

Here is a link to a sample of GoreZone's magazine online.

http://content.yudu.com/Library/A1nfuy/GorezoneAPRIL/resources/index.htm?referrerUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.yudu.com%2Fitem%2Fdetails%2F150286%2FGorezone-APRIL

Immi and I have been looking and studying it, especially at the movie's advertised to gain ideas for one of our preliminary tasks which is a poster for our new film.