Ivan's A2 BLOG!

Frame 1: FONT One of the ways I have challenged thriller trailer conventions is with the bizarre font. Usually with thriller trailers (as gathered from my trailer analysis) the font is usually quite simple and bleak to add a sense of realism to the film. However, I decided I would go in the other direction and make it stylish by making the font seem metallic (to emphasize the emotionless terror that lurks in the film) and the font has no structure, with letters sticking out and some letters being the wrong way up. This connotes the insanity and scizophrenic themes within the film. This is counter typical yes, but I believe adds identity to the film and helps the title as you remember it more. The movement is also rather unconventional, with each letter coming on after the other as oppose to the title coming on all together. I did this to connote the idea of mystery, that like every good mystery, little clues come out slowly one by one rather than finding out the outcome straight awa...

I have fixed the golden ticket font error. To make the puffs stand out and make them less generic, I coloured in certain words and made them slightly diagonal. This makes them seem more wacky and odd, which fits the indie/cult director persona I'm going for.

https://youtu.be/VXGCrVK0b00

In this draft, I decided to shrink the barcode as it was unnecessarily big., I also changed my puff on the bottom right bigger and changed the font colours to make it stand out more. I then decided to make the cover line go across the entire magazine to help it stand out, it also looks similar to the masthead which adds a familiar simplistic style. However I felt that the middle section of the magazine was feeling empty, so I decided to add some puffs and cover lines as well as a website link to add convergence and synergy to my advertising. I also decided to make the masthead bigger in order for it to stand out more. The only thing wrong with it is the font for the golden ticket sticking out. This error occurred when I attempted to move the sticker down so we could read the title better, this is something that can easily be fixed in the future.

http://adage.com/article/media/magazine-subscription-prices-continue-downward-trend/151723/ This article suggests that magazine prices have gone down in recent years. This helped me decide the price of my film magazine. It says that the price (around about the time of 2010) dropped from $1.79 to $1.65. If you translate that to pounds, you get £1.18. Because my magazine is unknown and not a popular brand like Empire or Total Film, instead of rounding the price up to a bigger number like say £1.20 or £1.50, I decided to round it to a pound as it is not well known and therefore will be less costly and also people could be more likely to buy something that is less expensive.

First trailer: https://youtu.be/eJImagW_l30 Second trailer: https://youtu.be/VaYWd8YWffw Changes from my first trailer to my second trailer includes a more dramatic score. With crescendos and a more chaotic piano piece as oppose to an ambient synth piece near the middle. I did this because people who saw the trailer said that the music wasn't dramatic enough and that it only got interesting near the end. Because of this feedback, I made the score more intense. I also took out the scene talking about christmas, as I personally found it to be too cheesy and people were complaining that the trailer was too long for a teaser, so taking out that scene kept the dramatic tone in check and helped short the running time. I also found the "DO NOT WATCH!" segment to be too cheesy as well and made it seem more like a horror than a thriller, so I took it out and replaced it with a segue that fit the surreal style of the trailer, with the film glitching out with a quick glimps...

https://youtu.be/VaYWd8YWffw

This is my poster for my movie THE RAPTUS.

 In my first draft, I've included images from my other projects to add a sense of variety with the films of discussion as most magazines are about multiple films rather than just one. I also thought that the main image should be a clip from the making of the movie rather than the movie itself as a lot of people like to know the behind the scenes of the films and it's part of why people read film magazines. The critic vs critic headline at the top was there to cover up blank space and the idea came from the fact that not only do people listen to critics (some of them having millions of subscribers on Youtube) but as proven by Siskel and Ebert, people love watching people argue. So I thought it'd be both funny and fitting to have a headline suggesting two critics going head to head against eachother and fighting over a movie. What I didn't like about this magazine though was that there was a lot of space that could have been covered up. This second draft has ...

From my day to day activities I have noticed that a lot of products are bought because they promise extra products inside them. Over the time I have noticed: Food promising cash prizes or "golden" tickets inside, whether it's a concert or a holiday. Magazines with toys or models inside. Website links to surveys in which if filled out could result in a prize, (e.g: fill out a macdonalds survey and you win a big mac). Even films include product placement that makes people want to buy the advertised products so that they feel like characters in the film (e.g: buy a sony phone to be like spider-man). Even toys themselves are guaranteed to have mini-toys inside them (e.g: polly pockets having characters and make up within a play house). I now realise that in order to make my magazine more successful, I should promise a prize inside, be it a holiday ticket or a voucher, something like that. That way, people will buy it more and therefore more copies will be sold. ...

I chose the setting of my hometown of St Neots for my film, a rather rural town. I did this as it fits the thriller genre of a grounded but generic setting that makes the film seem more real because it seems more benign. A lot of thriller films have rather unexciting settings: Psycho-motel. Rear Window-block of flats. Primal Fear-courtrooms. The Sixth Sense-Philadelphia. Se7en-unnamed city that is usually rainy and has dull colours. The rural setting however is something that is familiar in horror films as it helps to add a sense of isolation. Films like Get Out and The Wicker Man uses rural locations of forest towns and entire islands separate from the city to make you feel alone and helpless. This choice of a forest like setting adds to the loneliness of the picture and allows my film to gain atmosphere and identity while still being generic enough to be marketed like any other film. Pictures of St Neots:

I believe that with the research I have conducted into film trailers and films that best suit my thriller story, that I have stuck to typical conventions for the most part. However, I have admittedly gone in directions that would make this film and it's trailer unconventional and therefore difficult to market. In this reflection I will be acknowledging aspects of the trailer that are unconventional and giving my personal and analytical thoughts on it: 1: NO WOMEN: In a western media culture that takes pride in creating diversity and equal opportunity (a recent blockbuster "Black Panther" being a mostly black cast containing an all female military), the fact that I deliberately chose to not include females in my film was a bold move. This would make the film difficult to market as it is less diverse than some modern films and has less chance of bringing in a big audience. However it could be effected barely as fan bases for popular film franchises like Star Wars, The Te...

I included website links because in a digital society, a lot of movie marketing occurs online. Here are the amount of views the most viewed trailers have on Youtube: These figures shows that hundreds of millions watch film trailers, showing that a lot of profit happens online for film marketing. Here's also an image of four films coming out this year with website links: From this, I thought it'd be fitting to have website links in my trailer in order to add convergence and synergy that a realistic film would have while being advertised for the public.

When re-watching some of my favourite psychological thrillers, I noticed a lot of twists were hinted at in micro features that go over a lot of people's heads. For example, in Fight Club, we see Tyler Durden all over the film before he is introduced, hinting that he is imaginary. While The Sixth Sense uses the colour red to connote danger and helps guide the narrative through the film through to the final scene. In my film, the twist is that all the gang members are the main characters own demons and that he is literally fighting them. To connote this twist, I play every peculiar character that could be a bad guy to hint that it's all in the main character's heads and that they're all connected.

In conclusion of the Monsters Trailer essay I came up with a structure for my trailer. I decided to separate my trailer into three segments: Segment 1-the opening: The first segment is usually relaxed with fading transitions and helps sets up atmosphere. This segment is the one that introduces us into the film, so it will most likely have the slowest pacing to help the audience get into the film. Segment 2-the synopsis: This segment is slightly faster paced and tells more about the story and characters while still keeping the non linear structure in order to keep the vagueness there. This segment sums up what the film will be like and what it's about while still being brief so people aren't spoiled of the film and audiences will still want to see the film to see the brief synopsis be expanded upon and concluded. Segment 3-the climax: This is where the editing gets very fast to build up tension to a big crescendos, whether that is a final image that shocks the audi...

The real reason was that despite this being a non chronologically arranged trailer, in context of the story, which has a lot of nightmare scenes in it, I wanted to distinguish dream from reality. In context of the trailer (which has no real flowing narrative) it serves to make certain visuals more memorable and helps keep the trailer less formulaic and unpredictable with it's visuals. With a dream (black and white) and reality (technicolour) pattern set up, the inclusion of a red visual at the end adds something unknown to the table, adding an extra layer to the atmosphere of the trailer and ending on an ambiguous note where the viewer is lost (red also connotes danger). So we have reality, the nightmares and the unknown all from this colour palette and considering in a first trailer you shouldn't be told too much about the film, unknown is the best way to go. TECHNICOLOUR: BLACK AND WHITE: RED:

Trailers that inspired The Raptus Trailer: ALIEN (1979): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjLamj-b0I8 What inspired me was the non chronological montage of short scenes flashing together and building up to one loud crescendos. This however won't be the entirety of the trailer as I don't want this to seem like a rip off of Alien. Instead this is what the final third of my trailer will be like, a non chronological montage of multiple scenes that builds up to crescendos of noise and a haunting final image. THE EXORCIST (1973): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDGw1MTEe9k What I decided to take from this trailer was the idea of an eerie opening that has very ambient music with no real flow, then ending in a mini-crescendos before the real part of the trailer starts. I also noticed how they told the story of the film, giving a synopsis of the film without really spoiling the entire film or how it's going to end. An improvement I will make however is to not have a narrati...

MONSTERS (2010) TRAILER ANALYSIS: Opening shot: Relaxing with a fade in transition, crickets chirping as diegetic noise and mise-en-scene including children playing in the water (having fun). This contrasts what the rest of the trailer is going to be like. The next shot establishes male lead and his reaction to loud noise. The loud noise (diegetic) has connotations of destruction and is what we connect with the title, MONSTERS. Independent film studio brings in niche audience/fans of films created by Vertigo Films. TV filter adds grittiness to the trailer. Over the shoulder shot reveals what the sound was. Distance and scale implies the size of the problem. Medium close up establishes other protagonist/side character, possible love interest, assuming by her gender. Panning shot connotes the amount of destruction caused, hyping up the audience as they want to know what caused it. The cheap CGI smoke implies how independent the film is. ...