Conventions are a set of rules that can be followed or broken. They are followed so that the audience is able to identify what they are and why the are getting used in this particular way. They are sometimes broken, however, and can be turned into a bricolage in order to create something new from the old. They are broken because audiences sometimes become tired of watching the same sort of thing over again. Also, they come to expect certain things in the film or trailer, therefore there is no longer the element of surprise for the audience.
In AS, my brief was to create a music magazine, of the genre of my choosing. For the research part of it, I had to look at conventions commonly found in real music magazines, such as the main image, the masthead and the general colour scheme of the magazine. I analysed real magazines, focusing on rock magazines as the layout and structure of these should be quite similar to the product that I would make for my AS task. This is because the audience would be looking for something like existing rock music magazines as these are what they are interested in. I noticed that in rock magazines, the colour black is always used, whether it is for the text, the background, or for the actual image. I wanted to follow this convention in my magazine, so the main colour used within my magazine was black, which meant that the audience that this magazine is targeted at would recognise it as a rock magazine, because the colour black is iconic within the rock genre. This, however, did not show my understanding of conventions as the only reason I used them was because they were in similar places as the ones I looked at in the real music magazines.
In A2, my brief is to create a horror teaser trailer. My genre is supernatural, and in order to create a trailer of this subgenre, I had to research the conventions found in the supernatural genre, such as priests, low key lighting, religion, and child possession. Horror movies such as The Exorcist and Carrie showed me what is typically in supernatural horror trailers. This then allowed me to know what the audience should expect in my teaser trailer, and what it should look like. These conventions should in someway be incorporated into my trailer to make the product actually seem like a supernatural horror teaser trailer, with all the proper conventions seen in existing trailers.
In conclusion, I believe that my skills in the use of conventions has improved as I am able to not only identify key conventions, but actually understand why they are used, and use them as part of my own work.
