For the most part, we found that Crash Site supports and develops horror conventions rather than challenge them. The reason I have chosen The Blair Witch Project as a comparison is because it is also supposedly filmed with cameras held by the characters within the film rather than traditional 'cameraman' shots, essentially it is a sort of documentary horror.
I only watched The Blair Witch Project after we had finished our trailer so it was interesting to see how many similarities there were. The top left hand corner of the BWP shows a screenshot of an old women talking - she is talking about the Blair Witch and it dangers, similarly, we have a shot in our film in which one of the main characters says "We've heard bad things about this place." These are interesting pieces of footage as they both show an awareness of danger about the place which the Characters will be going, before they get there.There is also an interesting similarity in how the trailers are set up, and how this specific genre of film tends to build up the trailer in general. In the top right of the BWP poster, you can see a woman talking from inside her house, and this is also apparent in the top right of the Crash Site poster to the left. Other trailers with the same horror sub-genre such as paranormal activity also have this nice, peaceful home footage in the build up of their trailer, so our trailer certainly supports this stereotypical build up technique.
Another fairly stereotypical convention which our trailer supported was the use of simple, black and white inter-titles used to give a small backdrop on the story, which you can see on both posters to the left. The main difference here is that the titles on the BWP trailer tended to have more information on them, whereas our inter-titles tended to have less information, but there was more of them.
Shots of people running are another popular convention within this sub-genre. The second screenshot down on the right represents this in my Crash Site trailer, whilst the screenshot at the bottom of the BWP poster shows it there. This seems to be a very conventional shot used in this sub-genre, that of running away with the in hand camera. Another similar thing which is represented in both the BWP trailer and our Crash Site trailer is the dropping of the handheld camera (Bottom left on CS Poster, mid-right of BWP poster). In fact in our Crash Site trailer, a running shot was combined with the dropping of the camera to create an effect of panic and fear, as you don't really see in either trailer why they are running or why they were presumably forced into dropping the camera. Obviously, this would not happen in a normal film with standard cameras, but it is very common in the with films such as these with handheld cameras.
There were however a few shots in our film which break the conventions of these type of films. Usually, these films (Blair Witch Project, Paranormal Activity) are filmed by the characters handheld cameras the entire time, with no camera shot seemingly being a normal camera man filmed shot. However, our trailer broke this convention by doing a mix between the two, which seemed to work quite well. The top left and mid left screenshots on the Crash Site poster show two different shots which offer a sort of point of view shot - or at least it is meant to suggest that someone is looking at them - but crucially this is not supposed to be a handheld camera.
Our trailer also makes us of more general horror conventions which you see across the board in horror films. For example, Horror films are often very dark to give the impression of a certain fear of mystery. We deliberatly kept to this convention to ensure that our trailer looked like a horror film - we darkened the vast majority of our shots, including adjusting the saturation and brightness levels of the shots of the main characters in their home before they even leave. This is because we did not want any of our trailer to appear to bright or 'happy' since it is supposed to be a horror film trailer. The setting is also a very typical convetion, being in a sort of woods/forest area. These are typical of the Horror genre because they seem be isolated from civilisation and from normality, and thus instantly give the viewer that feeling that something bad could happen - which in turn is letting them know it's a horror without them even thinking about it. Again, this is something we deliberatly kept to so that we could ensure our trailer looked like a horror film trailer.
In conclusion I would say our Trailer heavily supports and uses conventions typical of its genre and sub-genre rather than challenge them. This is evident in everything from the way the trailer is built up, right down to very specific shots mentioned previously. The only main challenge to the convention of these Paranormal Horror/Home video/Documentary style films we have is the fact that only some of the film is supposed to be 'home footage' rather than the entire film being constructed of it like it is in popular portrayals of this genre such as paranormal activity.
What you have written is quite good but I have several comments. First your arrangement of images makes it difficult to follow this. It would be much better to put your images and those of the Blair Witch Project together as pair and discuss each in turn. Secondly you have focused very closely on one particular sub genre of horror. I would like you to broaden the discussion to talk about some more general conventions of horror, such as expressive, non-naturalistic camerawork, low-key high contrast lighting, settings which I now for the fundamental narrative of horror - the return of the repressed - to be explored. Your trailer uses all of these conventions but you have not explored them. Also you could look at the conventions of trailers themselves the ways in which they attempt to generate interest and desire to see the movie in the audience.
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