SOUND: There is no sound in my trailer except for the music, which was really important to me. Obviously, being a teaser trailer it's meant to tease, and I felt having any form of dialogue would somehow revert away from the shock of the imagery. Tied together with the creepy carnival music I found, the silence of those involved in my trailer is paramount to the tension and the sense of unknown. The soundtrack very much builds the tension effectively, simply because it leads up and up with this weird clown setting, with cat-calls and jeering stall-vendors, and so when it really kicks in it has an awesome effect on the credits. I've turned it on it's head using this music, purely because the only huge sound is cut off at the very end, so it's quite quiet and sombre.
MISE EN SCENE: Much of my trailer is in the dark, or at night, which since the dawn of time has been an ominous time of day, therefore goes perfectly with a horror film. I purposefully altered the lighting on the bits I shot during the day, to give it a grittier, more angst-inspiring feel, and this is maybe the one thing I kept conventional from the genre. Most of the hell and the bad stuff happens at night, or in a dark room, because this gives the feeling of blindness and loneliness and fear. The storyline throughout is very dark, and the mise-en-scene follows this pattern with the fast, jittery shots and the slow, creepy music.
EDITING: The editing is very much influenced by my experience watching horror films. This section of my coursework is probably the one where I stuck to the generic conventions like glue; you just can't escape the fact that fast, ghosting, jittery shots and darkness make a horror film what it is. Transitions are rapid and so fast you barely know what's happening, and in my editing I took more from films themselves than trailers - I definitley looked more at how films look as a whole than to how trailers look, because I wanted my trailer to sort of be like a little film on its own. There is now flow to my trailer, which I really like: if you saw it come on TV, or in a cinema, you'd be sitting there going "what the hell?", and try and work out what exactly you're watching.
CINEMATOGRAPHY: I used barely any hand-held shots, opting for the steadiness of a tripod instead because though my trailer is meant to be jittery and weird, I found it easier to get the shots I needed and edit them to look that way, instead of trying to achieve it through just raw footage. However, there are a few hand-held shots thrown in, and they break up the steadiness nicely; I especially like the shot of the car driving towards the camera at night, and the way the headlights sort of explode through the screen, and that was one of the few hand-held shots I insisted on. There is no panic aimed at the audience, only wonder and questions, and so I didn't feel the need to create tension and fear through fast, 'Cloverfield'-esque shots.
NARRATIVE: The narrative structure of my trailer alone goes against Todorov's theory. There is no equilibrium in it, since with Lexus being there there is already a disequilibirum, and I didn't plan on following Todorov's narrative structure anyway. It seems a bit too cookie-cutter, like he's only plucked the structure from a few certain well-chosen movies. There are many, many films that go against the grain, and I fully intended mine to be one of them.
However, my characters do fit Propp's theory. We have Lexus not only as the villain, but almost as the protagonist as well. She's the one with her name on the credits, it's named after her, but she's in no way the main character. I took the idea of this from the recent horror film Jennifer's Body, where it's named after Jennifer, the hype was about Megan Fox, who played her, but Jennifer is by no means the narrator or the main protagonist, yet she holds the film as her own, much like how I wanted Lexus to feel like.
My poster, I think, does sort of fit the normal conventions of a horror movie poster, despite the fact it's in landscape. I've explained why I decided to go with landscape, because when I was taking raw photos I always envisioned the poster in a cinema, not in like, a doorway or whatever. But the way it's edited and the image itself definitley scream "this is a horror movie!". Trying to juxtapose teen drama and horror together in one image actually proved rather easy; the shot is of what one would assume would be Lexus, a female, piercings, smoking, and it's quite sexual... All hints at teenage debauchery, and then with the editing it is transformed into a horror poster. Dark, matted colouring, with the skin on the face mottled and pale.
My magazine of course follows conventions because I used an existing magazine. Though Electric Sheep is a 'self-confessed deviant view of cinema', it is still a cinema magazine nonetheless, and so by virtue must follow at least one convention. I kept the mast-head and the panels exactly as they are, and simply placed my image behind them. The editing on that image is very simple, but effective. It was a few years ago, when I still had red hair, and so I purposefully chose the image because I could use the red to hint at the bloodshed and chaos of a horror film; I purposefully edited it to make my skin and the wall behind me seem pale in comparison to the red.
AUDIENCE RESEARCH AND RESPONSE
When doing my audience research and response, I kept alot of the conventions in mind, and wondered whether my target audience (in short, my classmates), would understand where my media products were coming from. I knew they'd view the poster and magazine as typical "me", but I hoped the trailer would shock them even further.
I asked ten people in my college to fill out a questionarre I'd written and answer truthfully, only after seeing the three media together. The questions were as follows;
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FILMED RESPONSE
I took three of my classmates, all with different tastes and styles, and sat them down to watch my trailer, in conjunction with my poster and magazine, and answer my questions (the ones in my questionarre) about their response. The three people are Jack Hoskins, Becca Boswell, and Jana Van Rensburg, all very different, and so all with different ideologies and responses towards my media products.
FIRST VIDEO - viewing 'Lexus' film trailer.
VIDEO COMING.
SECOND VIDEO - question and answer.
VIDEO COMING.
Through this research I have discovered how people view my trailer. Most interpret it as a weird, typically 'me' kind of trailer, what with the scary music and dark imagery, but they insisted this was exactly what they wanted to see. Everyone who watched my trailer agreed that they would happily pay money to see the film it promotes, and I feel I have made my trailer a success since that's precisely the purpose of a film trailer - to draw viewers in and make an audience for when the film is released. None had any idea whatsoever of the storyline, which I feel is another success; I never intended people to realise what they were watching - I briefly explained it to everyone so they'd understand, but not before I heard the amount of questions they had as soon as the traile finished. My Media teacher actually asked me questions, which I was happy with - the whole point is to ask questions.
