Question 1Our group at the beginning of the year looked at film trailers and movie so we can come up with an idea and what we liked was films such as Pulp Fiction, Taken and The Bourne Saga. These films mainly focused on the main character being put in a difficult position

in their lives and they wanted to act to save peoples lives by doing crime. Our movie was going to take on the forms and conventions of a thriller film which has a mix of

crime. Looking at these films and finding new ones such as Brick we want to match the same sound, camera shots, angles and focuses to create thriller just like these films. Techniques they used in their teaser trailers was too build up a mystery on why the

main character is taking a situation into there own hands and what they are trying to uncover, this is done with various close ups of important objects.

The first shot and key frame shows the hero of our trailer mourning over a girl in a long shot. We can tell by the way he is standing and expressing himself that he is very upset with the condition the girl is in. She is very important to him as shown by his reaction towards her condition, she is in a comor. Looking at the room around them we can see certain things that make out she is in a resting area or hospital such as the bed, lamp and how plain the room is.

This second key frame is text which says ‘When you think you know someone’. This is to build up the mystery feel and tension through the teaser trailer. Initially we think the character is upset but the text given shows otherwise. We took this example of Brick in there teaser trailer as the text they show in certain shots reveal some importance to the characters story. This gives a suggestion that the trailer will show or build up so kind of mystery, or even attract viewers into the film. Audiences can get attracted into films by teaser trailers because they want to find out what happens to certain characters in the actual film, this is shown in the Taken trailer as everyone wants to know what happens to the main characters daughter.

This close up is the 3rd key frame to our teaser trailer. It is a very effective shot as we see the main characters hand gripping into the victim of a crime that has just happened. This shot shows that these two maybe have a relationship with each other but the trailer doesn’t show enough evidence yet to show who these characters are yet. The gripping of hands also shows the characters emotions and how he is breaking down because of the girls condition. This is usually the time the main character will think to himself and whether to act for revenge which this is done in Taken and The Bourne Saga.

For the 4th shot/ key frame we have a mid close up of a certain item. It is a close up of the character finding some sort of book or diary from the girls possessions which were taken back to the hospital. With the character having access to the girl items this shows that they are close and maybe are related. In thrillers there is a certain drive that keeps characters to carry on and be strong and the book plays a part of how the character will try and track down the mystery event which happened to his sister. But we are left with mysteries as we don’t know what the character sees in the book t it must have some importance to finding out what happened to his sister.

This 5th shot looks very similar to a film we have been researching. This mid long shot shows what the main character is wearing, the environment around him and what key items he has on him. He still has the book clutched to him on his left and is holding a phone to his ear to show he is on the phone to someone. We can clearly see the main character has found some evidence about his sister and is acting on it fast. In Taken we see the character Liam Neeson do the same thing, he once answers about his daughter and finds them and uses a phone to contact a mysterious stranger. We are following the codes and conventions of a thriller by having a mysterious engimas all across our teaser trailer.

The 6th keyframe is an action shot showing the main character with his hands on what appears to be the villain for him so he thinks. The mid shot shows us the characters actions and facial expressions and the scenery around them. We can see the main character Ethan who appears to be all over the place and in rage with a random young man who he has met up with. He confronts him about his sister but the man doesn’t know what he is talking about. Ethan clearly thinks he has enough evidence to know this man is a bad guy but he doesn’t. The audience don’t know who this man is as well but can see how emotionally wrecked Ethan is. We see this in the main characters in Taken and Bourne as they struggle to hold their emotions and end up having to kill people to find answer.

7th keyframe I have chosen is the close up of a yellow note which falls on the floor beneath Ethans feet. He sees it and picks it up from the ground. It is a note that was hidden in the book that fell out which provides Ethan with some clues. After this shot we get to see his reaction as he has found something very important behind to note. The audience are left with another mystery as to what it says behind the note as he doesn’t turn it towards to camera. This is one of my favourite shots because wanted to make the character tease the audience with the information he has.

This is an extreme close up of the book which is also a panning shot which works its way around to book. This shot is very good and the focus on the book is superb. The reason we added an extreme close up of the book is that it will be the key items throughout the film and give Ethan information on what happened to his sister which provides locations she was last in, her entries by date and contacts. Thriller trailers show a lot of shots with close ups of a key item which people don’t seem to notice, this book suggests it has an impact with this film as it is seen all the time. Same with Taken but he doesn’t have a book that sources him, he gets sourced by the FBI’s information.

The final shot shows the main character walking down a long tunnel alone. This is an extreme long shot of him walking through the tunnel and the main title The Long Awakening appears as he walks. This shot shows the pain of the main character as he wanders various locations trying to find information. It suggests he is determined to find what happened to his sister at no cost. Its a very effective sot as the focus focuses on him until he walks away into the distance. The audience are left with so many mysteries that they want to know and that is how a thriller teaser trailer is usually shown, it thrills and teases people to find out what happens next. Thrillers want people to get emotionally attached to a character and make viewers wonder what happens if they were in that situation.

Film Poster

For the film poster we decided to go with a style that has been done already. We liked The Departed Poster because it showed characters through the text. It was a nice style to fit with a Thriller genre and it has a gloomy mystery feel behind it. The simple Black background provides a way to contrast the text and images inside so it will stand out. We didn’t copy the font but we kept that the font has to be bold and is aligned to the left hand side. With the main title and image being at the top it left us space to put things such as cast, social networks, age rating and any other relevant information. We included ratings, the tag line and a billing block on our poster as these are all conventional aspects of a poster. For example The Departed Poster has all these aspects and by looking at this we were able to look at this and use it in our poster, they didn’t have a rating though we had that as an extra.

Film Magazine

Our magazine cover was for Little White Lies, which is a well known film magazine in

modern London hipster culture. We chose to make our cover look a bit like a stylish

poster as this makes it stand out from other magazines and it links it to our genre. It also

links to the type of films Little White Lies look into because of their target audience

being from young adults and above. Little White Lies provides more of an artistic front

page and isn’t like Empire with lots of text and notices. We liked the artistic style this

magazine has to offer so we matched the conventions to what a Little White Lies

Magazine would look like. Usually front covers are in either a chalky effect, pencil effect

or painted effect so it looks like is has been hand drawn. We used photoshop and took a

picture on sight and made our image black and white then added lots of pencil shades

to create our design. We notice with every issue they have the same artistic effect but

each film has a different style so we had the brown book colour in a pencil brown colour

along with the colour having a brown outline around Ethan and some of the brick wall

being shaded in brown. The book is they important object in our film and having this

style creates a nice arty effect for our magazine cover.

ConclusionOur Thriller film teaser trailer follows the codes and conventions of other thriller teaser trailer because we followed Barthes enigma code. Trailers create enigma through discontinuity editing/ montage to add mystery and thrill to trailers. We used this along with most common thriller films such as Taken who use montage to show lots of events at once leaving people with questions that they want answers for. We also followed the Propp character types in our teaser trailer so people can identify who the Hero is, the Villain and the Princess who needs saving (this is the victim, Ethans sister). We also followed the Narrative theory by Todorov of a teaser trailer where we show Equilibrium being Disrupted by something and in order to repair the damage a new Equilibrium must be created. Our trailer follows Ethan who lives a normal life which gets disturbed when his sister gets badly injured and he starts to worry and in order to create a NEW equilibrium he must repair the old one by finding out answer and seeking revenge to try and re control his emotions. Overall we have matched the key codes and conventions a teaser trailer has to other and have seen these codes in other examples in order to create a guideline for our trailer.