Elements involved in the making of a horror cinema trailer
The aim of this essay is to create an audiovisual text using the film medium; I intend to use iconographies of my chose genre-Horror, in order to create a stimulus of recognition for the audience according to trends and typical patterns in the horror genre. I intend my target audience to be aged between eighteen and twenty five, an age group commonly known as “generation x” this is due to censorship issues for cinematography and because of the available disposable income and social trends of this age group.
I intend to produce a creative and effective media text in order to achieve maximum consumption and therefor hopefully maximum profit from the intended target audience.
The objective of my project is to apply all five key concepts appropriately.
It is impossible to cater for every individual so I have concluded that the most effective way of reaching any target audience is to separate consumers into elite groups of stereotypes.
These stereotypes are representative of a particular social group depending on accepted values and beliefs of or within sub-cultural groups, Stereotyping is an effective way of reaching intended audiences and is also similar to audience segmentation.
The success of a media text depends on its ability to support the generic conventions. Without this the audience will be unable to respond to the iconographies, as they are not familiar and will therefor become a passive audience. This will mean that the audience cannot enjoy the text as much as they would if they could relate to the media text and become an active audience. The Horror genre relies on a high degree of stylisation using subjective camera placement and motion, a fast pace of narrative is needed to maintain the audience’s attention and interest, and to keep them focused on the main elements of the main plot. There seems to be a trend in the style of narrative, the traditional narrative is using binary oppositions such as good vs. evil, and playing them off together. Also a traditional arrangement of characters is to have a villain, hero, hero sidekick, victim etc. These characters normally have their own relative roles inside the main narrative, all which help keep the story moving and helping the narrative develop into its own complex structure. The plot of a horror film is very different to that of a thriller, as the audience is aware of the trends in films, they understand typical iconographies from genres and can identify each genre by these. The audience expects certain twists and typical plots of a horror film. Where as with a thriller, the key element to the main plot is suspense and the slow unravelling of the end result. Cinematography also uses sound technology, as it is a vital part of understanding within a film, it is used to influence the audience emotively and causes the audience to subconsciously react to the visual aspect of the film, aided by sound.
