Question 1A: Describe how your analysis of the conventions of real media texts infromed your own creative media practice. Refer to a range of examples in your answer to show how these skills developed over time.

For my first foundation portfolio I created a rock music magazine called Dirt aimed at 17-30 year olds, mainly male. Then for my advanced portfolio, I created a teaser trailer for a horror film called Get Out and a poster and film magazine cover for Empire Magazine to accompany it. These were aimed at a 15-25 year old audience, equally male and female. Looking at conventions is important when creating a media product so you can give the audience what they expect and to give you a starting point when constructing you media product.

Before I started my foundation portfolio, I had no real understanding of conventions and their purpose. I quickly learnt that when creating a media text - whether it be magazine or trailer - that in order to create a product that the audience want and are expecting, you need to follow conventions. For example, when creating my magazine for my foundation portfolio I looked at existing covers for music magazines such as Classic Rock and NME in order to gain an understanding of the content and the layout that attracts fans of the genre and is what there are expecting to find in genre specific magazines. Conventions are important as they establish what genre is, grouping specific themes together and creating recognisable group, which indicates to the audience what is going to be shown. When it came to my front cover layout, I followed conventions for masthead, and colour that I saw on Classic Rock and Q in order to show my audience immediately what the genre is. One convention I followed strictly is the colour palette as it there are specific colours that relate to the rock genre that are recognisable and evident on existing magazine covers that I have looked at including Kerrang!. These are red, black and white. In order to visually attract my target audience and make indicate the genre immediately before even looking at other aspects of the colour I used these colours in cover, especially my title logo which would stick out and create a brand that reflects the rock genre and its audience. In terms of masthead, I followed ideas from NME and Q when choosing my positioning. As my title for my magazine was fairly small, and if stretched across the entire top half of the cover would look to big I decided to position it to the left corner as so it would not overpower the cover and not crowd up and constrict the main image. I also included the issue number and date as for my cover it worked out best there rather than in the right corner with the barcode and I saw examples of both positions. One convention that I challenged in terms of masthead is the fact my masthead is in the foreground of the cover rather than behind the image which is what I saw on existing magazine covers. I challenged this because my title was made to look like stencilled graffiti and therefore looked slightly more realistic placed over the top of the image rather than behind. 

When I started my advanced portfolio, I had more of an understanding of the importance of conventions and a stronger understanding of how to use and apply them to planning and construction of my work. As I had a deeper understanding of them, I could develop them and challenge them even more. When it came to looking at conventions for my advanced portfolio I had a much broader spectrum of media texts to look at due to creating a trailer, magazine cover and poster. This aided my creative decision making as it gave me the chance to look at broad conventions for the horror genre, and conventions specific to the each individual media text. I also had to look at conventions in terms of how I could effectively link together each of my products in order to create a recognisable sense of branding to help promote my film Get Out. When looking into existing teaser trailers, I looked at the teaser trailer for Hostel Part One (2005). One thing that stood out to me in this trailer was how the talking was limited to just screams and moans to emphasise the sense of pain. Instead of voice overs or clips of the characters talking, the story was told through the use of intertitles. This helped to cram in more action and get the audience hooked. Another convention I got from the Hostel trailer and other similar to it was the use of fast cut. These help to include more content and action into the small time space as well as the pace of the cuts matching the fast pace of the film itself. As I was doing a horror trailer, I knew there was certain aspects that had to be included that go with it such as lighting, and mise en scene. In terms of lighting, I knew to fit the horror genre the film had to be set at night, therefore resulting in the resultant footage being relatively dark which suited the genre and me having to use artificial light. Lighting was also thought about a lot in the shoot for the ancillary tasks. For this I looked to posters such as One Missed Call and vintage horror posters to mimic the shadowy lighting looking up at the model to create a dark image with a lot of shadow which reflects the horror genre.This technical planning was far more advanced than any technical planning such as lighting in my my foundation portfolio as I did not look into conventions as much, whereas in my advanced portfolio I spent more time looking into conventions and de constructing different trailers, posters and magazine covers. Mise en Scene was also carefully considered in relation to conventions. One area this strongly applied to was the use of location. I decided to use an abandoned Motel as it is a location that is typical to horror films, and the desolate location also made the film more believable. This also shows dramatic improvement from my foundation portfolio as for that I did not really pay much attention to choosing a location in terms of how it fit the genre and the ideas I was putting forward in the magazine.

In the advanced portfolio I also challenged some conventions as I had looked into them enough to decided how they could effectively be challenged without changing the genre or loosing the films appeal to the target audience. The main thing that I challenged was Carol J Clover's Final Girl theory. This theory states that the innocent, weak and typically blonde female character is the one who survives. I challenged this visually by having the final girl being ginger rather than blonde, and although I made her nervous and sceptical at the begining of the trailer, she immediately becomes stronger and fights back.

Overall, my analysis of conventions has greatly improved from my foundation portfolio to my advanced portfolio, with the first year me following the conventions, and also not having much understanding of them and their importance. Whereas in the second year not only did I have understanding of conventions to build upon but I got to look at the use of conventions over different media platforms which helped me understand conventions specific to each individual media text, and those which cover the genre across all platforms. I also felt confident enough with the understanding and use of conventions that I challenged some as well.