How our film trailer concept has been altered by looking at professional level examples Setting Our setting was chosen due to how we can achieve an eerie feel on a low budget and without the need for large amounts of travel, upon looking at similar films we found that the setting should serve us well with the right execution due to the nature of how schools look and how they are a familiar setting which for many people was remembered as being a place of comfort. Due to how we are distorting the setting it should become an easy source of unease and make our target audience uncomfortable.
Technical Codes For our film we stipulated upon using a found footage format but we also wanted the audience to have the ability to pay close attention to how we crafted the setting, we settled upon a more fluid camera after looking at similar productions as they all went for the more traditional style in order to not restrict the audiences viewpoint and allow the audience to perhaps see the perspectives of both our primary characters and not just one of them/the camera present in the story. We also found that having a camera in the hands of those acting out the parts would leave little for whoever in our group will be the cinematographers.
Iconography The iconography that will be employed in our film will be that of medieval folklore and also a classic murder mystery, using both the concept of a “Nightmare�(demon horse) and a demon along with the pretence of the death of a child in order to achieve an unsettling blend of the two and hopefully create a weird sense of familiarity with the audience as well as an overarching sense of unrest which we found was a very prominent aspect in the trailers we looked at and as a result we adopted it as a platform of which to have our scares spring from.
Narrative Our narrative is intended to play on the stereotypical storylines of similar films but add some small twists which will hopefully enable our film to pull away from being too bland and as a result interest our chosen audience rather than
make them think about the higher budget films which ours takes inspiration from. In terms of Todorov’s narrative theory, our narrative does not follow typical film convention and instead opts for the more horror centric structure of early small disruptions leading to a large one mid film, then calming down into the films close, letting the audience have some invested interest in the film throughout its runtime. We will use our trailer to show the smaller scares and leave the finale and the central/main scare for the film itself in typical fashion as otherwise what reason would someone have for coming to see our film
Characters The prominent characters in our film draw heavily from stereotype and thusly were inspired by the numerous examples in modern day and 80s-90s cinema, we opted for typical final girl and jock characters but thought that the pairing of them would be rather unique due to how in modern day media the two groups don’t exactly overlap in many ways but in essence they follow the opposites attract phrase In action due to how we intend for them to be good friends and the protagonists of the film. We came upon our stereotypical examples through how they are present in the productions we looked at and changed our characters story arcs and mannerisms accordingly, for example we made our final girl the smarter of the pair due how we think that will make them relatable to some of our target audience and how being smart suits how we described the character well.
Themes and Tone The tone of our trailer was intended to ramp up in action as the trailer progressed, with a tame start going into a scarier midsection ending with one of the larger scares of the main film in order to lure in our audience and slowly reel them in as the trailer progresses, upon looking at other trailers we saw a similar format with the film really just being condensed into a good but not best bits 90 second reel, leaving all the big bits for the main film as to not spoil tithe tone of the trailer will be rather sombre with the subject of dead children and demons lowering the tone from its intentionally normal starting point.