In What Ways Does Your Media Product Use, Develop Or Challenge Forms And Conventions Of Real Media Products?

Throughout the whole project I have had to research into other films and media products in order to get a clear insight as to what I could include in such things as the ancillary texts and the final product, however throughout collecting the research and planning my tasks I wanted to be original and use some creative flare, which I beleive is shown through the work I have produced.
In this section of the evaluation I intend to compare my film to that of others, how it's different, similar and how it challenges them.

Throughout my project of creating a zombie film I have looked closely at a number of similar films, mostly looking closely into Shaun of the Dead, Dead Snow and Zombieland,






I choose to look into these three films as they are generally very similar to my idea, they originate from the same style genre i.e. comedy/horror and of course are based around zombies.

One of the key areas I researched into was casting, to create a preffered reading for the text of my film, I felt a strong cast was needed and, when creating my post on the cast, and who I attempted to base my characters on, I originally looked deeply into Shaun of the Dead, attempting to recreate the two binary opposition chracters, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost along with the steroetypical good looking female character, Kate Ashfield, however, later on during my research I decided upon a new idea to mix the genre of road trip with horror including teenage characters to play my main roles, from this I decided to look closely at the cast of Road Trip with the idea to use 4 average college students with whom their personalties constantly clashed.

I feel that the characters I casted for my trailer fitted their roles very well, although some acting was unconvincing and perhaps if I had more time I would re-shoot some scenes, for example some of the fighting scenes looked inconvincing.

When it came to creating my ancillary products I wanted to keep a similar idea to that of my teaser campaign, i.e. with the tagline of the film being "How Far Would You Go... For A Beer?".
Early on when creating my teaser posters, I took a large amount of inspiration from that of the Saw posters, i.e. with the cut off hand, however along with my tagline I put a beer bottle in the severed hand giving a preffered reading to not only horror and violence but also comedy.

When creating my magazine cover I knew that it was important to create a similar layout to that of many other magazine front covers such as Empire, which is renowned as the biggest film magazine or Total Film for example and so when creating my front cover i attempted to use similar layout strategies that would attract a large audeince as both the other magazines do however I feel that my magazine cover did have a few weaknesses, firstly i beleive the title did not stand out or look proffesional enough to that of my target audience, and there fore did not bind well with the front cover image, when looking further into magazine covers with film specials, I noticed that the title sometimes would change colour or style in order to match that of the front cover image, for example when empire magazine did a special on the latest Batman film, The Dark Knight.


To create my teaser poster I did a very large amount of research into both teaser trailers, broken down and also the codes and conventions on teaser trailers, i.e. what they usually include, I feel that this was one of my strong points throughout this A2 course and meant that my final product could be highly related to that of other real media products such as the teaser trailer for Shaun of the Dead. However I feel that if I had the time to change any aspects of my teaser trailer then I would posibly change the music to relate more closely to that of other real media products.