Ben's Blog: Question 1: In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products : trailer pt. 2

The next convention in a trailer is to establish a leading character/s. I believe that I did this well. Whilst my trailer is meant to be short, we are meant to get the impression that the Father is a ‘no-nonsense’ character, he is out to protect his daughter from those who have kidnapped her. This character is reminiscent of Liam Neeson’s character in ‘Taken’, however unlike Neeson’s character, he, from the trailer, appears to call assistance which would suggest he may be taking the law into his own hands similar to Michael Caine’s character in ‘Harry Brown’. The character archetype is deeply rooted in many 70s Vigilante/Crime movies such as Charles Bronson in ‘Death Wish’ and Clint Eastwood in ‘Dirty Harry’, hopefully an audience will recognise an attempt to hark back to this rapidly disappearing genre of movie (However, the various resurgences of this genre e.g. ‘Taken’ and ‘Old Boy’ have been wildly successful). The other aspect that he fits in with characters of this type is in his age, the character is meant to be around 40 - 55.The daughter, on the other hand, is tightly in-line with kidnapping victims in movies, she is blonde and wears clothes that denote that she is probably wealthy, films with characters similar to this are ‘Man on Fire’ and ‘Ransom’. However, my character is older than the usual character in a kidnap movie, usually the daughter is around 5-9 years old, whilst the daughter in my film is 15.