Our trailer follows the conventions of other horror/thriller film trailers due to the fact that it contains fast-paced editing, quick straight cuts, fading to black, violent scenes, screaming, and it builds up tension and suspense. This generic convention can also be seen in trailers like ‘Nightmare on Elm Street’ (2010) and ‘Sin City’ (2005).
Our cultural experiences lead us to assume and expect that the murderer will be male; and our trailer does not contradict this stereotype. The murderer in our film is male, and the females are the victims who appear vulnerable and easy targets, which also follow the conventions of a horror/thriller. Films in the past gave men the resourceful and lead roles, whilst women were just the love interests and helpers. For example in films like ‘Superman’ (1978) and ‘Die Hard’ (1988) who have the reliable and heroic males as the main characters. Maggie Humm, author of ‘Feminism and Film’, (1997) still believes that these representations haven’t changed. This is supported by the opening few sentences in her book that says:
“Film… often and anxiously envisions women stereotypically as ‘good’ mothers or ‘bad’ hysterical careerists. [In the past, and] today, every Hollywood woman is someone else’s Other.”
This is mostly true in our film as we have the female officer who is just the helper of the male. However it does challenge this theory when the psychiatrist figures out who the murderer is. She is then killed which follows the conventions that females rarely turns out as the hero. It is very difficult to find an exception but ‘Charlie’s Angels’, ‘Lara Croft’, ‘Kill Bill’, and ‘Silence of the Lambs’ come to mind where strong women can be seen as heroic. However, it is still the case that they very often being controlled by a man or must be pleasing to the eye, which brings me to the Gaze theory which states that the females are only there for males to look at.
I would say that the structure of our film does not follow Todorov’s theory that all films have the same structure of equilibrium, disequilibrium, equilibrium. This is because although it starts off with the equilibrium which is disturbed creating disequilibrium when people are murdered. However, it does not end with everything being all fine so the resolution is unexpected.
Our film follows the theory of Vladimir Propp, who said that each film have certain characters.
The combination of my main product (trailer) and ancillary texts (poster and magazine) is effective because they share a style and colour scheme which connotes horror/thriller. For example the main colour scheme is black and red and the poster shows one of the main characters from the trailer.
Each member of my group designed a film poster and a magazine front cover. Therefore, we all chose different fonts for the film title. The group then made the decision to use Dan’s poster as the final promotional poster. We chose Dan’s because we felt that it best represented the style, plot and target audience for our film.
We realised real film posters and trailers would contain the same typography on all the different media products so that it can become associated with the film, allowing the audience to recognise it.
To create our media trailer, we used ‘Adobe Premier Elements 1.0’. It was easy to use but the only downside was that it crashed occasionally. To overcome this problem we rendered and saved the trailer constantly.
Once we had finished our trailer, we showed it to some people within our target audience and found that the trailer successfully appealed to them. We interviewed people both male and female aged 16-25, as well as asking the opinions of some older people to see if our film would attract a wider target audience, as opposed to just a niche one.
The feedback that we received was very good and encouraging. When asked whether they got to the cinema often most of them replied that they only go once or twice a year and only when they cannot wait for the film to come out on DVD. The reason for this is because, as students, they cannot afford it. However, all the interviewees said that they would go to watch this film at the cinema after watching the trailer and looking at the poster.
The audience guessed that the genre of the film was thriller and, surprisingly, they also suspected that there would be some sort of psychological aspect as well. The clips of the main character sleeping, suggested this. This supports the fact that our film follows the conventions of the specific genres because the audience was able to distinguish the correct genre of our film from the trailer. How? Because they will recognize the typical conventions associated with the thriller genre like fast-paced editing and tense music.
One suggestion for improvement that we got was to have less clips of running. I have to say that I agree with this because I think the long running scene breaks it up a bit and you rarely see a full running scene on a trailer. Maybe if we broke it up a little by having different shots in between? If our trailer were to be broadcasted, then I would definitely change the running scene.
We also showed our poster, trailer and magazine cover to the audience to see whether they thought they worked well together. They all agreed that they did, because the same font was used in the trailer as n the poster. Also the main character from the trailer was featured on the front of the poster.
As for my magazine cover, the immediate response was that it would appeal to them, a young audience because it looked aesthetically pleasing with the different typefaces, fun layout and the picture of the ‘young new director’. However, when asked about the cover lines and whether they would be interested in reading the stories mentioned on the cover, they commented that only a limited amount of people would know that Helenswood was a school, so would not understand it. This is true but I am going to argue that it will possibly make them want to look inside to find out what ‘Helenswood’ is… But this was a fair point to have been made by my, very honest, target audience.
To record our feedback, we used a video camera to tape the audience responses. I think this is a way more effective way than a questionnaire of recording the response because it means you get a longer answer and you get their immediate opinion because on paper they have time to think about their response. I think filming the response gets you a much more accurate reply.
To conclude, I am very pleased with the feedback that we received from our target audience about our trailer, poster and magazine cover. From the responses, I believe that if our film were to be made, it would be a very successful mainstream thriller film and would appeal to a wide audience. Maybe one day a famous director would feel the same…
