Trailer
Plot:
It is essential that the father takes the child from the mother, as the convention is that the male is always represented as stronger. This is why the mothers search attempt in the trailer is so weak and she does not succeed so far, because the male is stronger. This also adds to the audience’s inquisitiveness, making them want to go and see the movie, making it a successful part of the campaign.
Also at the beginning there are shots of how it was before the incident, which is and important convention in the film “Taken” as if they weren’t there, there would be nothing to compare it to. For all the audience knows, there may not have even been a daughter in the first place.
The conventions involving Vladimir Propp's sphere's of action, that one action provokes another in our case the child being missing made the mother look for her is the action of Villainy/Lack.
Tzvetan Todorov's equilibrium is another convention often used in the making of teaser trailers, conventionally the equilibrium is evident at the start therefore we made it evident. The disruption of the equilibrium has to be acknowledged which in our trailer it is. In is essential to the advertising campaign that the restoration of the equilibrium is not show as the audience would have no motive of going to see the film if the ending had been given away, therefore we had to leave the plot unsolve and the child still missing.
Shots and Editing:
The first shot shown on screen is the title screen conventional to all films trailers as I discovered in analysis and simply looking for appropriate trailers to analyse.
Conventionally a mixture of shots in different locations are used to provoke the feeling of confusion and to overwhelm the viewer, this is a technique we used, in some parts parallel editing is used when the mother and child become disorientated (shots 40-53).
There is a mixture of shots and editing techniques used to create different moods, such as fast shots and quick editing create suspense and a panicky, frightened mood.
At the start the editing slow with lots of cross fades which is common of this type of genre (shots 2-4) we also applied an effect to them so it was evident they had taken place in the past. The slow editing is particularly common in the teaser trailer “Taken”.
Towards the middle/end the editing is fast and disorientating which is conventional of this type of genre, using lots of quick cuts, shot-reverse shots which we also used in the teaser trailer “Taken”.
The shot types are of a wide variety looking from different angles such as low angle (shot 38) and perspectives such as through bushes (shots 26 and 29), which is conventional of the trailers analysed in this genre.
The our trailer involves both copy (text on screen) and diegetic sound. This is extremely similar to the teaser trailer 'Mirrors'. In our trailer we chose music and copy mainly only involving narrative on two occasions. Music is found in every single trailer so in that respect our trailer is extremely conventional but it is also less conventional in the way that we used copy more than narrative. We used more copy as it was generally easier in the sense that we did not have to find locations which were extremely silent or worry about recording the narrative separately and syncing it to the video.
Mise en Scene:
The mise en scene used in this trailer is very conventional. As in “Taken” there are no exceptionally abnormal locations, a house was used, a regular high street, a forest area etc, it is the action which is important.
The clothing was also conventional for all characters, the child wearing girly clothes, carrying a cuddly toy, the kidnapper in a dark coloured hoodie, the mother in 'normal' clothes. The villain, in this case the kidnapper, is often seen wearing dark colours as seen in the “SAW” film trailer which I analysed where the evil character is easily identifiable by the use of his hood, a convention we adapted by using a hoodie.
The child we chose had blonde curly hair which is conventionally more innocent, she then wore a bright coloured jumper and held a cuddly toy, and this makes her look even more innocent. The cuddly toy is the most stereotypical thing about having a child go missing in the film, we could have done more with the teddy bear like have the mother find it on the street or something but we felt that was going into the story too much for a teaser trailer.
Film poster
Our poster is very conventional in the way it has reviews from newspapers, the same font all over it, no background colour, only the main image, the title of the film being the largest font, the names of the actors at the top and the names of the production team underneath the title with company details under that.
Magazine Cover
It is conventional for the magazine cover to contain a main image which overlaps the title, like ours does. It is also conventional for it to contain pugs, a barcode, price, tag line and the name of the magazine which ours also does. Also competitions are commonly displayed on the front cover of a magazine a pull factor for the consumer to buy the magazine, read the magazine and go see the film. Our magazine cover is unconventional in the way that all of the film names are in a different font, displayed as they would be on their own film posters. I think that this is a good idea because the use of an eye-catching font could make the consumer remember where they have seen it before possibly reminding them that they wanted to see the film making it more popular in the box office.
The Whole Advertising Campaign
There is a convetion that the same font should run through the whole advertising campaign. In our case we used the font on the magazine cover, film poster and as the copy in the film trailer. We used this convention but at the same time broke a convention of font on the magazine cover using different fonts for the different film names effectively linking them all to their own advertising campaigns (if they existed). We also used a photo of the actress in character, straight from the trailer on the front of our magazine this is also conventional of the magazine covers which I analysed with characters such as Harry Potter and Jason Bourne appearing.
How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
I would say the combination of our main products and ancillary text is very effective as all of our media texts are linked in many ways. The same font was used on the copy as the magazine front cover and film poster, linking them altogether. This linking is very important in fonts, an example of how how strong it can be is the Harry Potter series, its font is widely recognised, the lightening bolt 'P', one hint of that and many people already know what that media text it concerns. The colour of this font, white, is also continuous through the media texts, especially between the film poster and teaser trailer where is also has a black background. The photograph on our magazine cover contains the main actresses as though she is straight from the trailer but it is posed especially as this is the convention I discovered in my analysis. The photo on the film poster is also posed but it's a shot that we had shot therefore it has a closer link to teaser trailer than the magazine cover. It was also made sure that the continutity between filming and photographing was perfect. Overall if our advertising campaign was to become public, it would be evident that all of the products were linked.
What have you learned from your audience feedback?
Our audience feed back taught us that there were many aspects that could be improved therefore we re-shot some of our trailer and re-worked our magazine cover. In the trailer we discovered certain shots were more popular than others, for example the fast sequence of the mum spinning around by the road calling her daughters name was more popular than the old opening sequence of the father leaving and reviersing off the drive as it was too slow. Therefore we replaced this with more entertaining shots of the child playing but shtill keeping the pace slow. We also learned that some narrative was also more entertaining, the narrative needed to ask some rhetorical questions that could only be answered by watching the whole film, but still, copy is essential in the story telling of the trailer as much of our audience found out. It is not uncommon to have a teaser trailer not in chronological order, in our first trailer it was in chronological order which tended to tell too much of a story so in the re-shooting and editing process the second time around we took the comments from our audience feed back and re ordered some things. It still tells a story but not the whole story and only points out the more important aspects of the plot.
I did find that the first choice of music was popular with people commenting on how the music changes as the editing speed changes too, but in the end this didn't work out as with the re-ordering a new track was needed so using garage band we created a track much like the previous. It had the slower part at the start and quickened with the pace of the editing which was popular with the audience.
How did you use media technologies in the construction and research planning and evaluation stages?
For the construction of our film trailer the media technologies used were a high quality video camera (and tripod) to obtain clear, well focused, precise shots making an overall more professional trailer. Then to actually construct the footage filmed into a film trailer Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 was used for the editing. This programme enabled us to use special effects on our shots and insert shot transitions such as cross fades and dissolves to make our piece flow smoothy especcially when the pace was supposed to be slow. We took advantage of this programme by applying shot transitions such as cross-fades, cross-dissolves and fades to black. Effects were also applied to the first 3 shots to make them look older, we faded the edges by focusing the light on the middle of the shot and applying the ageing effect, I feel that this worked well. This programme allowed us to create titles quickly and easily using the "title" feature allowing us to insert copy into our trailer, with captions such as "Prepared to reveal the truth" to help narrate our the film trailer with out the use of a voice. This programme was a bit hard to get to grips with but once I understood it, it was extremely helpful with nothing it couldn't do.
To achieve the perfect soundtrack we used the internent and found a website which is full of unlicensed music tracks with helpful genres such as action, tension building, sinister and dark which greatly aided us with choosing ones the fit with the mood. The search tool (seen to the left) website was extremely helpful as you could select all the characteristics of the track which you were looking for. When the results came up it was handy because you didn't have to download the whole track, a demo was availble for download, it was transferred staight into 'Itunes' which then play the track from the internet, if you were interested in downloading the whole track there was then ones of different lengths and sizes depending on how large you wanted it.When we had a track for the slow section at the start and one for the fast paced section in the middle and towards the end, we then could mix them together in 'Garage Band'. This allowed us to choose how and when we wanted the tracks to fade in. By this point we had edited an were able to fit the track exactly to the trailer getting the correct length.
With the research and planning stages the main media technology used was the internet. In the case of the research stage websites such as 'youtube.com' were used to search for appropriate teaser trailers of a similiar genre so we could analyse them and see what conventions should be followed/broken and then using the internet posted our analysis onto this blog. Blogging all of our progress has been much easier than having to create a folder, especially with the use of videos it. It would be very difficult to portray what was meant in the analysis, on paper without having the actual video to view, also it would have meant alot of time spent on sketching key shots from teaser trailers, wasting time.Again with the evaluation stage the main media techonolgy was the internet using once again to broadcast our final film trailer on 'youtube.com' and then embed it on our blogs. It also allowed other people to view our blog and give feedback via email, something key to the development and re-working of our coursework. Also the shot by shot analysis of our film trailer was produced by using the "screen grab" application on the Apple Mac computers, these shots were then compiled in photoshop and number and once again loaded onto our blogs ready for the use in analysis and evaluation.
Media technologies were key in the construction, research and planning stages of my media coursework, mostly all helped and saved time, just the seach for music became lengthy but that was only due to the wide range of choice!
