Film Trailers

Evaluation

Our film was called Alone, we named it this as the trailer shows one boy being alone in his school we tried our best to show the desperation of the boy by using various enigma like drones and noises. These noises add suspense and tension to the trailer keeping the viewer on the edge of their seats. Our primary target audience is 15 – 24 year olds we this will appeal to the as many teenagers are interested in scary movies and stay this way until they really hit the world, for example when they get a full time job. We have tried to stick to the conventions of the genre by using such editing techniques as black and white to reflect a dark and mysterious mood, slow motion to show everything in detail and loud noises to show the horror factor of the advertisement.                                                                                                            We made this advert basing the idea on an age group of 15 – 50 we thought this because, being it a horror film the certificate will be 18 probably, but these days most 15 year old have seen them they just pester their parents to buy it for them so they are still a market for us our average upper bound is 50, all though we realise some people will see this over this age but that age is just a guide line.                                    We asked a few classmates to act as an audience for our advertisement. We asked them to leave comments with us as well; some of the good points included: “I think the music goes really well with the opening shot” this quote would be referring to our establishing shot of the school building and hallways, another quote reads: “The slow motion shots were effective because its shows the expression on his face in detail.” This quote is referring to the shot of him running through the door seeing this thing and running back.                                                                                                                                     From these comments we were also given some improvements which if were to release this we’d obviously revise this. These comments include: “The scream should have been cut shorter.” and “The voice over drags on to much.” I think that now these comments have been put forward we have seen and understood why they were cast and agree completely with them.                                                                        For our recording of the voice over we had to find a room that was quiet enough to record in luckily our school has the facilities of music rooms close by the media department so using these was an option. We recorded using a handheld microphone/recorder all-in-one device so recording wasn’t brilliant but over the music in the trailer it wasn’t a bad sound and the grainy sound in the background was also an added feature of tension and mysteriousness. For most of the camera shots we used still camera to give a sense of isolation we achieved this using a tri-pod on a high level table this is the shot we used in the room he walks in and there is no-one there, this shot looks a lot like a CCTV point. There’s one shot where our actor comes from round the corner and the camera is moving towards him at a fair pace and he looks up to see something and runs backwards as he gets scared this shot is a extreme long shot, but gets closer to a medium/long by the end of the shot. I think next time we need to look at a wider variety of shots just because I don’t think we kept the audience on the edge of their seats this obviously is a vital necessity because we want the viewer to see the titles at the end and then think to them selves “Oh, that looks good” this is the main concept of an advert works. I think on our editing we ticked all the boxes we had special effects, we had sound drones, we had lots of musical pieces in the back ground edited to fit in with one and other, it was a hit, and we had no comments saying our editing needs a touch up. By the looks of things our font sizing and colours were a good too as no one mentioned it in a comment and I thought it was one of the best parts of the trailer.

                  This type of advert was to promote a mystery film and some typical aspects of this genre are:

Gore, shock, sound drones, fast cutting clips, loud fast noises and sounds. Our trailer was similar to professional trailer because we used sounds and music effectively and we sequenced the clips with these sounds to give that professional feel. When we look at the Vladimir Propp and Tzvetan Todorov narrative theories we see that Propp’s theory works with ours in that our only character is the damsel and the hero and this unknown beast is the villain of he story also Todorov’s theory works with the trailer as well because the equilibrium would be the school with everyone in a normal school day then the disruption would be the fact of this unknown-being being there then the resolution of the whole thing is exactly what you’ll see if you were to do as the advert is trying make you; see the film. This Trailer is a single strand narrative as being only one character that’s in it so far you’d struggle to have more than one story to it.

                  Did I learn any new skills? I think I did, I got a lot of understanding of how to construct the sound for a clip and how to get it to fit a video professionally. It will help a lot in future work produced in my media lessons. Working in a group was a problem in the first instance but as we progressed we sorted that out and we finished the production working well as a pair. I think it would be good idea to work with other people in the future as well as out friends to work on those people skills we aspire for.