EVALUATION Q.1: GENRE CONVENTIONS

PREP Upload by Thursday 9 March into your 'page' Evaluation q.1

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

(Your answer also serves as  G325: Sec A: Theoretical Evaluation of Production
Question 1 (b) EVALUATE YOUR PRODUCTION IN RELATION TO GENRE)

You present this using annotations in YouTube. Today, on your blog under a post entitled EVALUATION: NOTES FOR Q.1 GENRE CONVENTIONS, start to write succint (=brief), insightful notes that will go on screen as analytical captions. You do not always need to use full sentences.

One way of presenting your explanation is to evaluate how far your production reflects / challenges genre conventions. A useful article by Ian Wall, director of Film Space is on MediaMagazine The ultimate how-to guide to making trailers  (April 2014)

He writes:

The purpose of trailers

The obvious purpose of a trailer is to make people want to see a film. But how does it go about this? In his book Visible Fictions the film theorist John Ellis suggests that what a trailer does is to present a narrative image of the film. Basically the trailer is telling us what the film is like, it is giving us an idea of the film. He points out that the narrative image of a film is

''decidedly less than the whole film - it is the promise (of the film) and the film is the performance and realisation of that promise.''

The trailer, along with posters and other marketing materials offer a promise of what the film will deliver to audiences, of what pleasures the film offers. If we are going to find a film pleasurable then it will need to offer something new, but at the same time it will build on our knowledge and experience of other films. It will play on that knowledge that we already have about films. It will use our awareness of genre, of certain stars and what they promise, of particular brands (for example, Batman or an adaptation from Marvel comics). It will use this knowledge but it will promise something more, something new.

1. Explain the purpose of a film promotion package that includes a trailer,a film poster and film magazine cover (designed to create initial audience interest, curiousity). Who is your target audience and what is the whole package designed to achieve (briefly)?
2. Identify the genre conventions: a theatrical trailer for most films is between 2 and 2.5 minutes. State how long your trailer is.
3. What is your film's USP?  
4. Production company ident
5. Identify the film's genre and start to compose notes about how the film's genre is signalled through visual codes  such as narrative (=character & events); privileging the protagonists; lighting; mise-en-scene; 
6. ...and through sound codes (minimal dialogue / enhanced diegetic sounds, musical soundtrack, spot sounds, leit motifs)
7. ... and through camerawork and framing (restricting the frame, over the shoulder shots, reaction shots, point of view shots, tracking shot, arc pan?) Stress the variety of shots.
8. ...and through editing (rapid pace, hard /straight cuts, sound and vision editing, motivated edit), ellipsis
9. The creation of enigma to hook the target viewer, the need for a balance between revealing the whole of the narrative arc and the need for surprise, shock
10.  Comment on institutional genre conventions such as the title and when it appears, inter-titles, release date ('coming soon', in cinemas June 2017), puffs, awards, social media, film website
11. Draw attention to aspects of your filming and editing that work effectively.