Tuesday, 26 January 2010
Monday, 25 January 2010
Questionaire
We decided to ask a few questions on what people generally expect to see from a film trailer, not genre specific, but just the features they expect to see. The last question focuses on peoples first thoughts about horror trailers.
Questionnaire 1
Is there anything in particular that would catch your attention when watching a good trailer?
Quite a difficult question to identify what makes a good trailer – but I expect that anything especially funny, exciting or noteworthy would catch my attention.
Where would you be most likely to see a film trailer? For example in the cinema, online and so on.
My job is to programme a small cinema so I often look online at trailers. If this was not my job, I expect that if I was making a decision about what to go and see and had online access, I would take a look at trailers as well synopses. The other location where I am most likely to see a film trailer is at the cinema.
How long would you expect a typical trailer to last?
2 minutes 30 seconds max
How much of a films storyline would you expect to see in a trailer?
I would expect the trailer to tell the story of the film in abbreviated form, in a 3 act structure similar to a feature length film, but without giving away the ending or including any ‘spoilers’.
What do you expect to see when watching the trailer for a new ‘horror’ film?
Indication of what will cause horror / terror to audience and strong sense of menace. Obviously this film genre incorporates a number of sub-genres and repeated themes such as vampire themes, slasher themes, zombie themes, demonic possession, evil children, haunted houses, cannibalism etc. I am not a big horror fan, so find it difficult to analyse what new trends there are in the horror genre at the moment.
Questionnaire 2
Is there anything in particular that would catch your attention when watching a good trailer?
I need a strong idea to catch my attention in the first few seconds... you know how it is when you meet someone new, you kind of make up your mind about them with the first hand shake!
Where would you be most likely to see a film trailer? For example in the cinema, online and so on.
at the moment it is probably a bit of everything, but in order: on-line (my computer opens on the Apple homepage which has a good trailer section) followed by cinema, DVD, and TV.
How long would you expect a typical trailer to last?
think it has to do the business in about a minute, as I don't want to learn too much about the film, just enough to draw me in. Want all the twists in the plot to be a surprise, so please don't feed me a summary of the film as some do, which answers 4).
What do you expect to see when watching the trailer for a new ‘horror’ film?
probably somebody scared shitless... but what is the cause?
Questionnaire 3
Is there anything in particular that would catch your attention when watching a good trailer?
Some trailers turn out to be better than the film their advertising, the Match of the Day syndrome i.e. all the best bits can make the match seem a lot better than it was. The film trailers job is to entice people to want to watch what’s on offer. Therefore its got to be appealing to the demography that its aimed at, it should allow a brief synopsis of the story, without giving to much away, certainly demonstrate the genre and I personally like to see who’s directing the movie and who’s appearing in it. (I would not miss the latest Nicole Kidman).
Where would you be most likely to see a film trailer? For example in the cinema, online and so on.
I am quite traditional, I enjoy seeing trailers in the cinema before the main feature, this I feel adds to the cinema going experience. Admittedly I also enjoy the trailers provided on some DVD’s where you can some times get an appetiser for a more obscure movie,I have purchased DVD’s on the strength of this.
How long would you expect a typical trailer to last?
Not to long, perhaps between 1.5 and 2 minutes except in exceptional circumstances for example The Dark Knights trailer for the IMAX experience.
How much of a films storyline would you expect to see in a trailer?
Just enough to entice your interest, give too much away and theirs no point in seeing the film?
What do you expect to see when watching the trailer for a new ‘horror’ film?
From a quite beginning to a build up of atmosphere and tension. Introduction of main characters. Some scary bits with a coating of blood. One or two blunt/startling tag lines.
Questionnaire 4
Is there anything in particular that would catch your attention when watching a good trailer?
One thing is what the first person said - a good beat. The one in that particular trailer seemed a little too simple and endless though for my tastes. A simple beat's good for me as long as it doesn't last for too long. Also, I hate pictures in a film trailer. Whatever words are used should be selected carefully, and there can be a few words spoken by a character and there, but those are more just to go with the audio and keep the interest of the viewer.
Where would you be most likely to see a film trailer? For example in the cinema, online and so on.
Online. I don't go to the movies often enough.
How long would you expect a typical trailer to last?
The best would be about a minute, but no more than two minutes.
How much of a films storyline would you expect to see in a trailer?
It should be mysterious, but I wouldn't want the whole plot revealed. Maybe showing bits of the climax, and if the concept of the movie (like the concept of a post-apocalyptic time period) is the strong part, then focus on that. If the climax is the only strong part though, then reveal more of the premise and bits of the climax.
What do you expect to see when watching the trailer for a new ‘horror’ film?
A simple audio probably. Visually-speaking, maybe darkness. And through selective wording in the trailer, making the viewer wonder what the horror in this film is (example: In the trailer for "the Orphan", they focused a lot how you won't figure out her secret, blah blah, and kept it mysterious and intriguing enough to the point where people put the spoilers online within days of it coming out because they were so curious XP).
Horror film trailers tend to be awfully alike though, so I'd want there to be some uniqueness to how the trailer plays out...it usually involves the girl running away from the creepy guy or monster, some gore, and searching for help. Doing that isn't necessarily a bad thing, as suspense is needed in a good trailer, but maybe try brainstorming other ideas, like focusing on other sides of the film, like the emotional (not necessarily screaming, but maybe people crawled up on streets, staring at nothing Something like that maybe).
Questionnaire 1
Is there anything in particular that would catch your attention when watching a good trailer?
Quite a difficult question to identify what makes a good trailer – but I expect that anything especially funny, exciting or noteworthy would catch my attention.
Where would you be most likely to see a film trailer? For example in the cinema, online and so on.
My job is to programme a small cinema so I often look online at trailers. If this was not my job, I expect that if I was making a decision about what to go and see and had online access, I would take a look at trailers as well synopses. The other location where I am most likely to see a film trailer is at the cinema.
How long would you expect a typical trailer to last?
2 minutes 30 seconds max
How much of a films storyline would you expect to see in a trailer?
I would expect the trailer to tell the story of the film in abbreviated form, in a 3 act structure similar to a feature length film, but without giving away the ending or including any ‘spoilers’.
What do you expect to see when watching the trailer for a new ‘horror’ film?
Indication of what will cause horror / terror to audience and strong sense of menace. Obviously this film genre incorporates a number of sub-genres and repeated themes such as vampire themes, slasher themes, zombie themes, demonic possession, evil children, haunted houses, cannibalism etc. I am not a big horror fan, so find it difficult to analyse what new trends there are in the horror genre at the moment.
Questionnaire 2
Is there anything in particular that would catch your attention when watching a good trailer?
I need a strong idea to catch my attention in the first few seconds... you know how it is when you meet someone new, you kind of make up your mind about them with the first hand shake!
Where would you be most likely to see a film trailer? For example in the cinema, online and so on.
at the moment it is probably a bit of everything, but in order: on-line (my computer opens on the Apple homepage which has a good trailer section) followed by cinema, DVD, and TV.
How long would you expect a typical trailer to last?
think it has to do the business in about a minute, as I don't want to learn too much about the film, just enough to draw me in. Want all the twists in the plot to be a surprise, so please don't feed me a summary of the film as some do, which answers 4).
What do you expect to see when watching the trailer for a new ‘horror’ film?
probably somebody scared shitless... but what is the cause?
Questionnaire 3
Is there anything in particular that would catch your attention when watching a good trailer?
Some trailers turn out to be better than the film their advertising, the Match of the Day syndrome i.e. all the best bits can make the match seem a lot better than it was. The film trailers job is to entice people to want to watch what’s on offer. Therefore its got to be appealing to the demography that its aimed at, it should allow a brief synopsis of the story, without giving to much away, certainly demonstrate the genre and I personally like to see who’s directing the movie and who’s appearing in it. (I would not miss the latest Nicole Kidman).
Where would you be most likely to see a film trailer? For example in the cinema, online and so on.
I am quite traditional, I enjoy seeing trailers in the cinema before the main feature, this I feel adds to the cinema going experience. Admittedly I also enjoy the trailers provided on some DVD’s where you can some times get an appetiser for a more obscure movie,I have purchased DVD’s on the strength of this.
How long would you expect a typical trailer to last?
Not to long, perhaps between 1.5 and 2 minutes except in exceptional circumstances for example The Dark Knights trailer for the IMAX experience.
How much of a films storyline would you expect to see in a trailer?
Just enough to entice your interest, give too much away and theirs no point in seeing the film?
What do you expect to see when watching the trailer for a new ‘horror’ film?
From a quite beginning to a build up of atmosphere and tension. Introduction of main characters. Some scary bits with a coating of blood. One or two blunt/startling tag lines.
Questionnaire 4
Is there anything in particular that would catch your attention when watching a good trailer?
One thing is what the first person said - a good beat. The one in that particular trailer seemed a little too simple and endless though for my tastes. A simple beat's good for me as long as it doesn't last for too long. Also, I hate pictures in a film trailer. Whatever words are used should be selected carefully, and there can be a few words spoken by a character and there, but those are more just to go with the audio and keep the interest of the viewer.
Where would you be most likely to see a film trailer? For example in the cinema, online and so on.
Online. I don't go to the movies often enough.
How long would you expect a typical trailer to last?
The best would be about a minute, but no more than two minutes.
How much of a films storyline would you expect to see in a trailer?
It should be mysterious, but I wouldn't want the whole plot revealed. Maybe showing bits of the climax, and if the concept of the movie (like the concept of a post-apocalyptic time period) is the strong part, then focus on that. If the climax is the only strong part though, then reveal more of the premise and bits of the climax.
What do you expect to see when watching the trailer for a new ‘horror’ film?
A simple audio probably. Visually-speaking, maybe darkness. And through selective wording in the trailer, making the viewer wonder what the horror in this film is (example: In the trailer for "the Orphan", they focused a lot how you won't figure out her secret, blah blah, and kept it mysterious and intriguing enough to the point where people put the spoilers online within days of it coming out because they were so curious XP).
Horror film trailers tend to be awfully alike though, so I'd want there to be some uniqueness to how the trailer plays out...it usually involves the girl running away from the creepy guy or monster, some gore, and searching for help. Doing that isn't necessarily a bad thing, as suspense is needed in a good trailer, but maybe try brainstorming other ideas, like focusing on other sides of the film, like the emotional (not necessarily screaming, but maybe people crawled up on streets, staring at nothing Something like that maybe).
Saturday, 23 January 2010
The Guardian Article - "A Little Bit Of What You Fancy."
Movie Trailers used to be pretty formulaic - just shw the best bits - but, in the age of the internet viral, they're now works of art in themselves, says Jane Graham.
If you’re looking for art or auteur-ship at the cinema, you’re likely to be waiting for the main feature, not concentrating on the trailers for what were quaintly known as “coming attractions”. As long as they have existed, trailers have been the tool of film marketing departments aiming solely to secure the maximum number of bums on seats. Experimentations with the form has not been a big part of the story. There have been brief flourishes of artistic advancement, such as the move towards fast-edit montages led by Kubrick in the early 1960’s, and periodical oddities, like Hitchcock’s personally hosted guided tour of the Bates Motel for Psycho, and the mock advertisement for the Ghostbusters’ services, which led to the advertised phone number taking 1,000 calla an hour for six weeks In 1984. But the vast majority of studio-financed trailer-makers have played it safe, their audience-tested trailers following the basic three-act rule of set-up, jeopardy and emotional- or action-based blow out.
Now, however, thanks mainly to that feral little monster, the internet, and one of its most recent and riotous offspring, the viral, there are strong signs of a creeping rebellion in trailer-making. The teams behind trailers for the likes of Cloverfield, The Dark Night, District 9, Paranormal Activity and Inglourious Basterds have risen to the challenge of the new frontier, ushering in what might reasonably be considered a golden age of invention in the field. The future direction of film marketing is unclear, and that provides fertile ground for risk-taking - not because the studios have learned to stop worrying and take a punt, but because they’re navigating unknown territory. It’s not quite the wild west out there, but a comparison to the early days of rock’n’roll might stand up.
“The studios have had to learn to relax in terms of controlling the film promo,” says Ryan Parsons, owner of Traileraddict.com, a site that gathers and posts trailers. “The internet is wild. Things come out before they’re supposed to, info is leaked, footage is leaked. The studios are just now learning to exploit that, rather than try to curtail it. The marketing people I’ve talked to say that even when they’re chasing down the source of a leak now, they know it doesn’t really harm them - it all reminds people the film exists.”
Trailers are immensely popular online. According to research by the Alliance of Women Film Journalists, movie trailers rank third in popularity among the 10bn videos viewed online every year, after news and user-created video. The growth of social networking sites, and particularly the instant buzz of Twitter, in the last two years have moved the goalposts. That process has been further boosted by the development of movie virals - which count online-only videos and interactive “alternate reality” games among their techniques for sucking punters in. The street-smart trailer-makers are the ones involved in multi-platform campaigns for which the release of the trailer is either the climax or the launch pad.
JJ Abrams’ Cloverfield trailer, released in July 2007, was a brilliant example of the latter. Shown in US cinemas before the blockbuster Transformers, this teaser used footage from what looked like a home movie featuring screaming, running crowds and explosions in New York. Flying in the face of the first commandment of film promo (constantly supported by market research) that the more a trailer explains and reveals, the more commercially effective it is, it was devoid of information and untitled - only a release date and the name of JJ Abrams appeared onscreen.
“In the case of Cloverfield the trailer started the viral,” says Nick Butler, who runs the site movie viral.com. “People watched the trailer over and over to look for clues, because the whole thing was such a mystery. Some people thought it was about terrorism, or maybe it had something to do with Lost [Abrams’ TV series]. The trailer sent people off to check out the associated website, thousands of people did exactly that and the online buzz grew like crazy. In the next few months, we were sent all over the internet. In the end I saw the film four times, constantly looking for links between it and the trailer.”
Cloverfield is a perfect example of a trailer that capitalised on the new, more demanding world in which trailers now operate. They must fight for attention online against hundreds of others, be available for viewing 24/7, and face the fact that while they might spark a rush of excitement, they can also cause a sigh of disappointment. Cloverfield also proved that for those studios willing to take the new challenges head on, the rewards could be plentiful. No surprise then that Sony moved in on the action, steering the team at LA’s Create Advertising towards a similar approach for Neill Blomkamp’s alien thriller District 9.
“The studio had a big online and billboard campaign planned,” says David Stern, owner of Create. “They were working on the notion that maybe it was better to pose questions in the trailer than tell people everything. When we found out about their campaign, we actually ditched our first, more traditional, story-orientated, trailer for one that just implied something is going on in District 9 but we’re not telling you what. We even made two versions - one blurred the alien and didn’t subtitle his words, so it really made people wonder what was going on.
The experiment paid off - District 9 took $37m on its opening weekend this August and stayed strong through the summer. Sony approached its early trailers for Roland Emmerich’s 2012 in the same way, again backing them up with a wave of viral marketing.
Trailer-maker Mark Rance has been a victim of the studio’s natural timidity in the past. His daring ideas for promos for The Prestige, which proposed to use the screen like a theatre stage, complete with red curtain framing, were received with enthusiasm by director Christopher Nolan and his producer-partner Emma Thomas, but rejected by Touchstone Pictures. A mere year on however, he was involved in a campaign for The Dark Night that saw the studios, increasingly aware of the possibilities for a film’s extra-curricular online life, loosen up a little.
Rance was hired to direct a series of online trailers titled Gotham Tonight. They aired once a week for the six weeks leading up to the film’s release and expanded on an ostensibly minor thread within it, prior knowledge of which was rewarded with a narrative pay-off in the movie.
The Dark Night was accompanied by a wildly varied and imaginative viral which involved numerous websites, interactive games and a treasure hunt, climaxing with the Imax-hosted launch of a six minute trailer, showing the effervescent heist scene from the film (James Cameron went seven minutes better with the Imax-premiered Avatar trailer this August). Rance agrees that the dawn of virals and Twitter have forced the studios to experiment with trailers, but he firmly believes that their inherent conservatism will lead to a more homogenised approach once they get their heads around the territory.
“Clamping down is part of the system,” he says. “They’ll end up just copying other ideas that have worked. Of course a viral shouldn’t be a repeat of another viral , it should be like improvised jazz, taking on it’s own life. But to call the studios cautious - that’s a polite way of putting it.”
As David Stern suggests, the most significant impact that Rance’s “improv” virals have had on trailers has been to free them from a commitment to plot information. The best online trailers don’t go beyond “teaser” territory, needing only to intrigue, or even confuse, to set film fans off on a detective’s quest. This has allowed for some genuinely innovative and smart promo work, like the fake news report on Dr Manhattan that formed part of the alternative Watchmen universe, and the Coraline trailer in which Neil Gaiman gravely described the effects of koumpounophobia, the fear of buttons, which set the tone for his script.
Also fantastically curiosity-pricking was the trailer for the German war film Nation’s Pride - “by Alois von Eichberg” - which seemed to come from nowhere when it debuted this August. Nation’s Pride turned out to be the (Eli Roth directed) film within the film of Inglourious Basterds and, apart from ramping up the Basterds-related buzz, it showed film fans that Tarantino was truly one of them, an enthusiast who had fun with the parallel online life of the movie.
Cheeringly, the incredible word of mouth around the hugely successful $11,000 budget horror Paranormal Activity - bolstered by what Hugo Grumbar, president of distribution at Icon Films, calls an “experience trailer” showing terrified audiences’ reaction - proves that viral marketing is not restricted to top-end films. In fact imagination and original thinking is more crucial to the success of this kind of marketing than big bucks, as the mid-budget District 9 also showed.
Of course there are other, more subtle, ways of exploiting the opportunities that high-speed word of mouth presents and the ever-pioneering Disney Pixar is master of the “double hit”. Pixar has always made pester-power-engendering trailers, full of high-speed adventure and snappy one-liners, then rewarded parents with the high quality of its finished films. Recently it has gone further, hitting unsuspecting mums and dads with mournful stories of broken-hearted widowers and a surprisingly faithful, highly literary Dickens adaptation, ensuring a whole new promotional afterlife for Up and A Christmas Carol after their release.
Grumbar admits he attempted a similar trick with Icon’s Bridge To Terabithia. “I thought if we slightly missold the trailer as Narnia or something like that, people wouldn’t feel cheated when they saw the film because it was satisfying for all kinds of audiences. Did it pay off? Absolutely.”
If you’re looking for art or auteur-ship at the cinema, you’re likely to be waiting for the main feature, not concentrating on the trailers for what were quaintly known as “coming attractions”. As long as they have existed, trailers have been the tool of film marketing departments aiming solely to secure the maximum number of bums on seats. Experimentations with the form has not been a big part of the story. There have been brief flourishes of artistic advancement, such as the move towards fast-edit montages led by Kubrick in the early 1960’s, and periodical oddities, like Hitchcock’s personally hosted guided tour of the Bates Motel for Psycho, and the mock advertisement for the Ghostbusters’ services, which led to the advertised phone number taking 1,000 calla an hour for six weeks In 1984. But the vast majority of studio-financed trailer-makers have played it safe, their audience-tested trailers following the basic three-act rule of set-up, jeopardy and emotional- or action-based blow out.
Now, however, thanks mainly to that feral little monster, the internet, and one of its most recent and riotous offspring, the viral, there are strong signs of a creeping rebellion in trailer-making. The teams behind trailers for the likes of Cloverfield, The Dark Night, District 9, Paranormal Activity and Inglourious Basterds have risen to the challenge of the new frontier, ushering in what might reasonably be considered a golden age of invention in the field. The future direction of film marketing is unclear, and that provides fertile ground for risk-taking - not because the studios have learned to stop worrying and take a punt, but because they’re navigating unknown territory. It’s not quite the wild west out there, but a comparison to the early days of rock’n’roll might stand up.
“The studios have had to learn to relax in terms of controlling the film promo,” says Ryan Parsons, owner of Traileraddict.com, a site that gathers and posts trailers. “The internet is wild. Things come out before they’re supposed to, info is leaked, footage is leaked. The studios are just now learning to exploit that, rather than try to curtail it. The marketing people I’ve talked to say that even when they’re chasing down the source of a leak now, they know it doesn’t really harm them - it all reminds people the film exists.”
Trailers are immensely popular online. According to research by the Alliance of Women Film Journalists, movie trailers rank third in popularity among the 10bn videos viewed online every year, after news and user-created video. The growth of social networking sites, and particularly the instant buzz of Twitter, in the last two years have moved the goalposts. That process has been further boosted by the development of movie virals - which count online-only videos and interactive “alternate reality” games among their techniques for sucking punters in. The street-smart trailer-makers are the ones involved in multi-platform campaigns for which the release of the trailer is either the climax or the launch pad.
JJ Abrams’ Cloverfield trailer, released in July 2007, was a brilliant example of the latter. Shown in US cinemas before the blockbuster Transformers, this teaser used footage from what looked like a home movie featuring screaming, running crowds and explosions in New York. Flying in the face of the first commandment of film promo (constantly supported by market research) that the more a trailer explains and reveals, the more commercially effective it is, it was devoid of information and untitled - only a release date and the name of JJ Abrams appeared onscreen.
“In the case of Cloverfield the trailer started the viral,” says Nick Butler, who runs the site movie viral.com. “People watched the trailer over and over to look for clues, because the whole thing was such a mystery. Some people thought it was about terrorism, or maybe it had something to do with Lost [Abrams’ TV series]. The trailer sent people off to check out the associated website, thousands of people did exactly that and the online buzz grew like crazy. In the next few months, we were sent all over the internet. In the end I saw the film four times, constantly looking for links between it and the trailer.”
Cloverfield is a perfect example of a trailer that capitalised on the new, more demanding world in which trailers now operate. They must fight for attention online against hundreds of others, be available for viewing 24/7, and face the fact that while they might spark a rush of excitement, they can also cause a sigh of disappointment. Cloverfield also proved that for those studios willing to take the new challenges head on, the rewards could be plentiful. No surprise then that Sony moved in on the action, steering the team at LA’s Create Advertising towards a similar approach for Neill Blomkamp’s alien thriller District 9.
“The studio had a big online and billboard campaign planned,” says David Stern, owner of Create. “They were working on the notion that maybe it was better to pose questions in the trailer than tell people everything. When we found out about their campaign, we actually ditched our first, more traditional, story-orientated, trailer for one that just implied something is going on in District 9 but we’re not telling you what. We even made two versions - one blurred the alien and didn’t subtitle his words, so it really made people wonder what was going on.
The experiment paid off - District 9 took $37m on its opening weekend this August and stayed strong through the summer. Sony approached its early trailers for Roland Emmerich’s 2012 in the same way, again backing them up with a wave of viral marketing.
Trailer-maker Mark Rance has been a victim of the studio’s natural timidity in the past. His daring ideas for promos for The Prestige, which proposed to use the screen like a theatre stage, complete with red curtain framing, were received with enthusiasm by director Christopher Nolan and his producer-partner Emma Thomas, but rejected by Touchstone Pictures. A mere year on however, he was involved in a campaign for The Dark Night that saw the studios, increasingly aware of the possibilities for a film’s extra-curricular online life, loosen up a little.
Rance was hired to direct a series of online trailers titled Gotham Tonight. They aired once a week for the six weeks leading up to the film’s release and expanded on an ostensibly minor thread within it, prior knowledge of which was rewarded with a narrative pay-off in the movie.
The Dark Night was accompanied by a wildly varied and imaginative viral which involved numerous websites, interactive games and a treasure hunt, climaxing with the Imax-hosted launch of a six minute trailer, showing the effervescent heist scene from the film (James Cameron went seven minutes better with the Imax-premiered Avatar trailer this August). Rance agrees that the dawn of virals and Twitter have forced the studios to experiment with trailers, but he firmly believes that their inherent conservatism will lead to a more homogenised approach once they get their heads around the territory.
“Clamping down is part of the system,” he says. “They’ll end up just copying other ideas that have worked. Of course a viral shouldn’t be a repeat of another viral , it should be like improvised jazz, taking on it’s own life. But to call the studios cautious - that’s a polite way of putting it.”
As David Stern suggests, the most significant impact that Rance’s “improv” virals have had on trailers has been to free them from a commitment to plot information. The best online trailers don’t go beyond “teaser” territory, needing only to intrigue, or even confuse, to set film fans off on a detective’s quest. This has allowed for some genuinely innovative and smart promo work, like the fake news report on Dr Manhattan that formed part of the alternative Watchmen universe, and the Coraline trailer in which Neil Gaiman gravely described the effects of koumpounophobia, the fear of buttons, which set the tone for his script.
Also fantastically curiosity-pricking was the trailer for the German war film Nation’s Pride - “by Alois von Eichberg” - which seemed to come from nowhere when it debuted this August. Nation’s Pride turned out to be the (Eli Roth directed) film within the film of Inglourious Basterds and, apart from ramping up the Basterds-related buzz, it showed film fans that Tarantino was truly one of them, an enthusiast who had fun with the parallel online life of the movie.
Cheeringly, the incredible word of mouth around the hugely successful $11,000 budget horror Paranormal Activity - bolstered by what Hugo Grumbar, president of distribution at Icon Films, calls an “experience trailer” showing terrified audiences’ reaction - proves that viral marketing is not restricted to top-end films. In fact imagination and original thinking is more crucial to the success of this kind of marketing than big bucks, as the mid-budget District 9 also showed.
Of course there are other, more subtle, ways of exploiting the opportunities that high-speed word of mouth presents and the ever-pioneering Disney Pixar is master of the “double hit”. Pixar has always made pester-power-engendering trailers, full of high-speed adventure and snappy one-liners, then rewarded parents with the high quality of its finished films. Recently it has gone further, hitting unsuspecting mums and dads with mournful stories of broken-hearted widowers and a surprisingly faithful, highly literary Dickens adaptation, ensuring a whole new promotional afterlife for Up and A Christmas Carol after their release.
Grumbar admits he attempted a similar trick with Icon’s Bridge To Terabithia. “I thought if we slightly missold the trailer as Narnia or something like that, people wouldn’t feel cheated when they saw the film because it was satisfying for all kinds of audiences. Did it pay off? Absolutely.”
Monday, 11 January 2010
Music.
Possible song for the beginning of our trailer, Follows similar music from other horror film trailers - Eerie sounding, sharp and jarring.
The Camera.
Effects -
We found that, when setting the camera to White Balence and using colours other than white, we could achieve a different colour for filming. For example, if the camera uses White Balence on an orange colour rather than white, the effect will be a darker colour for filming, which can work in changing day to night while shooting.
We also found that we had to get the focus and exposure perfect for our shot to have the look of a real film. However within some scenes we found that over exposing the camera worked really well as it gave it a creepy unnatural look which works well for the horror genre.
We also experimented with changing the shutter speed which also gave it an eerie look as it slowed everything down, and caused a juddering effect on the movement within the shot.
Possible Locations
Some possible locations for our trailer:
- Looking up at a window from the street. We plan to put a shot like his in our trailer, with the "stalker" looking up at the girl as she's in her room with another boy.
- Looking up at a window from the street. We plan to put a shot like his in our trailer, with the "stalker" looking up at the girl as she's in her room with another boy.
Camera Shots/Angles
Point of View Shot
Horror Films often use point of view shots, to give the audience more of a first hand account of what’s happening. Obviously the idea of a horror film is to reel the audience in, and make the empathise with the characters; the idea being making us feel the fear that they do. A good example of this is in the original Friday the 13th, we get to see the reactions of the characters as the killer, Jason advances at them. Its also a good way of masking your killers identity as obviously if we are in the ’shoes’ of the killer. We cant actually see him/her, which gives the film a sense of mystery, and makes it a lot scarier as the scariest thing is in effect the unknown.
Low Angle
Low angles make the ‘Victim’ seem powerless. They are usually used when the ‘killer’ is in his prime. For example the picture is from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, when ‘leather face’ is killing a character. They create the feeling of being trapped, that there’s no escape. The victim is helpless and small.
Long shot
Long shots can be used as establishing shots. They help set up the movie, and work well at the beginning of trailers as well. They set the scene and give the audience an idea of were the film is set/located. They work well for Horror films as a long shot can show the audience an isolated area. They work well when showing us how alone the characters are, but it also reinforces the fact that later on when things start to go wrong there is nowhere to run.
Close-up
Close ups are a really important factor of Horror films. They Show the emotions of the characters, which tells the audience how they should be feeling as well, which is usually scared. They can show reactions (reaction shots) to different situations, which help keep a story moving. Close ups provide a way of communicating with out speech. For example in a scene were a ’killer’ is in the room, and a character must stay quiet and hide we may see a close up of them shaking and crying.
Extreme Close-up
Extreme close-ups work the same way as close-ups but they make the situation seem un natural. Perhaps a reaction to an un-human killer. They also show reactions to heightened and magnified situations. Horror films are usually really dramatic so they work well to show this. They can also be of things directly related to horror, such as weapons, or body parts, so they create a bigger impact and emphasise things.
Over the Shoulder shot
Over the Shoulder Shot lets the audience take a ‘back seat look at things. Unlike the point of view shot which places them directly in the midst of the action. We can still see the characters reaction to what’s happening. This works well if we already know who the killer is, for example we see ‘Freddy’ in the picture, throughout the film so its not like a big reveal. The shot also lets us see everything that’s happening within the scene, but were still quite close thus still involved allowing us to feel the fear , or any other emotion. The shot also reinforces that something is happening between to characters , like talking or in this case, an exchange between victim and killer.
Horror Films often use point of view shots, to give the audience more of a first hand account of what’s happening. Obviously the idea of a horror film is to reel the audience in, and make the empathise with the characters; the idea being making us feel the fear that they do. A good example of this is in the original Friday the 13th, we get to see the reactions of the characters as the killer, Jason advances at them. Its also a good way of masking your killers identity as obviously if we are in the ’shoes’ of the killer. We cant actually see him/her, which gives the film a sense of mystery, and makes it a lot scarier as the scariest thing is in effect the unknown.
Low Angle
Low angles make the ‘Victim’ seem powerless. They are usually used when the ‘killer’ is in his prime. For example the picture is from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, when ‘leather face’ is killing a character. They create the feeling of being trapped, that there’s no escape. The victim is helpless and small.
Long shot
Long shots can be used as establishing shots. They help set up the movie, and work well at the beginning of trailers as well. They set the scene and give the audience an idea of were the film is set/located. They work well for Horror films as a long shot can show the audience an isolated area. They work well when showing us how alone the characters are, but it also reinforces the fact that later on when things start to go wrong there is nowhere to run.
Close-up
Close ups are a really important factor of Horror films. They Show the emotions of the characters, which tells the audience how they should be feeling as well, which is usually scared. They can show reactions (reaction shots) to different situations, which help keep a story moving. Close ups provide a way of communicating with out speech. For example in a scene were a ’killer’ is in the room, and a character must stay quiet and hide we may see a close up of them shaking and crying.
Extreme Close-up
Extreme close-ups work the same way as close-ups but they make the situation seem un natural. Perhaps a reaction to an un-human killer. They also show reactions to heightened and magnified situations. Horror films are usually really dramatic so they work well to show this. They can also be of things directly related to horror, such as weapons, or body parts, so they create a bigger impact and emphasise things.
Over the Shoulder shot
Over the Shoulder Shot lets the audience take a ‘back seat look at things. Unlike the point of view shot which places them directly in the midst of the action. We can still see the characters reaction to what’s happening. This works well if we already know who the killer is, for example we see ‘Freddy’ in the picture, throughout the film so its not like a big reveal. The shot also lets us see everything that’s happening within the scene, but were still quite close thus still involved allowing us to feel the fear , or any other emotion. The shot also reinforces that something is happening between to characters , like talking or in this case, an exchange between victim and killer.
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