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

In order to create a media product that looks believeable and professional, I needed to follow classic conventions of the mystery genre. Not only with the products themselves, but the narrative and the background that they branch from. In my trailer I used the following conventions in order to achieve this form of professionalism.

1. Narration done by the main character
2. Introduction to the female protagonist.
3. Not giving away too much information
4. Titles used and release date
5. A cross with the horror genre in order to create tension or a sense or eerieness.

The 2 main challenges to genre conventions I have used are through the use of narrative and the way I had edited my trailer. In the narrative the story tends to revolve around and tell the story of a live detective but in this case it is the story of a DEAD girl who is discovering who killed her. The sequence I had created is literally a possible sequence of the film (if it were to be made) instead of different aspects of the film in non-chronological order. In comparison, the trailer of Sherlock Holmes 2, as it comes from a literary genre, it is alot more straightforward in the narrative and the audience can already figure out the ending as because of our culture we learn that the "hero" saves the day and figures out the mystery. Also, this trailer is a lot faster then mine because it does seem to come across as a bit of an action/adventure aswell, which is also why I had a cross between multiple genre's otherwise it may lose my target audiences attention.

In my poster design, I followed many conventions such as

1. One dominant Image
2. Credits and subtext
3. No actual location as a background
4. An information hierarchy through size of text
5. Costume and how the actors are positioned affecting the genre

The main points that a poster needs to hold is the fact that it needs to be eye-catching and captivating so that my target audience will look at it. Another important convention of any poster that I had considered is the use of a tagline, or a quote from the trailer that will stay in the audiences mind. It has to be something clever but quite open at the same time which therefore gives my audience something to think about but can also relate it back to the film.

In my magazine cover I used the following conventions to make it look professional
- Information hierarchy in terms of size of text
- Taglines
- Cover lines
- Dominant and sub-dominant images
- Overlapping texts and images
- Barcodes and advertisements

In the Sherlock Holmes magazine cover however, it utilizes the same sort of conventions but in comparison to mine there is some difference. The Masthead in my product is on the side instead of on the top and this breaks magazine conventions but is also a development as it is different to what people are used to. In order to keep the theme of a camera focus going through my magazine cover, I made a film strip consisting of a screenshots from my trailer which I put on the side and thus making it different in comparison to most other film magazines. One of the main obvious differences between my product and the FILM magazine cover, is the use of colour. In the issue shown of Sherlock Holmes, it utilizes alot of blue and shades of blue as this reflects Sherlock's calm and cool personality and also gives a hint of mystery because of the foggy effect. In my Magazine cover however there is mainly a combination of dark colours for the images and background but in order to make the text more noticeable and easier to read I used bright colours that are in contrast to it which is more effective then using any colour.