My Trailer and…

Liz Fisher

Genre.

Genre.Audience feedback from screenshots.

From the feedback I have received from my target audience I have found that my teaser trailer fits the conventions of a horror, I needed to make sure that my audience believed that it was a horror.

I knew that I needed to get the audience feedback as I was very close to my trailer and felt it was important to get feedback from people that hadn’t seen anything to do with it before.

However, I have been told that it doesn’t follow as many obvious conventions of psychological thrillers, this is because I believe those elements needed to be more subtle, and would be difficult to include in my trailer without giving away too much of the storyline.

Genre.

The way this shot conforms to my genre of psychological horror by the look on my main character’s face. It relates more to the horror side of as the character’s face looks scared and worried. The location is also quite conventional for horror films as it is an abandoned forest location, this is effective for horror films as it keeps all the focus on the main character, the one being terrorised. To conform to this convention I have only used shots of the main character in my teaser trailer.

This is a screen shot from the trailer of the horror film ‘One Missed Call’ . This shot shows a stereotypical shot from thriller trailers such as the one I’ve included in mine.

Narrative.

Todorov’s Equilibrium.

• The ways in which my trailer has adhered to Todorov’s theory of equilibrium is by having my trailer start off with the original state of equilibrium and then as the trailer continues it becomes clear that there has been a disruption to this.

It is difficult to follow narrative theories whilst creating a teaser trailer as in trailers you don’t show the whole narrative instead have a broken narrative in order to attract your audience. I have, however still tried to include these theories, wither to adhere to them or to flout them.

Propp’s Spheres of Action.

•As I have only created a teaser trailer, I wasn’t able to include all the characters for Propp’s spheres of action, but even if I could I wouldn’t necessarily include all of them as then my trailer wouldn’t follow the conventions of horror films to include a smallernumber of different types of characters. In order to create an effective horror trailer I only included Propp’s ‘hero' character.

Levi-Strauss’s Oppositions.

•Like most films and therefore most trailers I have included Levi-Strauss’s opposition theory in my teaser trailer, the way I have included this is by showing that their is good and evil. I have, however tried to make this quite subtle as my trailer is asub-genre of horror and focuses on a psychological element and therefore only shown the character the audience will assume is the ‘good’ character.

Audience.

• My target audience is teenagers aged from 15, this is because I wanted it to have a strong horror theme to it.

• I also feel it would be primarily a male audience as horror films are more stereotypically a male viewed genre of films.

• The way my trailer relates to my target audience is because my main character is the same age as my audience and therefore is highly relatable to the audience making them more likely to want to watch the film.