Film Trailer Proposal Or Something

With the analysis out of the way, we got into our groups and started working on what we were going to do for our own film trailer. We did have the choice of either making a documentary or a music video for our final piece, but we all decided that having done the work on Film Trailers more recently, as well as having already done a music video and finding documentaries downright boring to make, we decided that making a film trailer for a fictional film would be the best course of action.

After a short brainstorming session, we had decided on a basic outline of the story of our film - a young man, Joel, would go to his cousin, a psychotic drug dealer, and tell him that he didn't have the money to afford University. His cousin would enter him into a poker game, which Joel would then lose after betting all the money that his cousin lent him. In an effort to pay off the debt, Joel would commit several crimes and eventually end up becoming so good at criminal work that he'd begin to work for his cousin full time. After being given a job with a rival crime boss, Joel's cousin would be uncomfortable with the thought of Joel working with anyone other than himself, as Joel had been making him a lot of money. Joel's cousin would kidnap Joel, hold him captive in a place far away from anywhere else, and either interrogate him, employ him, or shoot him. By that point we hadn't thought of an ending, and decided to just end the trailer with a cliffhanger as Joel is held at gunpoint by his cousin.

This was the basic idea we had for our film trailer. We decided that we'd try and inform the audience of the basic plot, considering that we'd been too vague concerning the fate of the protagonist in our music video and wanted to make sure that the audience knew enough of what was going on as far as the plot of our fake film was concerned. Since it was a realistic action / crime oriented fim, we'd have to make sure it was realistic to the point where it wasn't too far-fetched, which meant that we'd have to make sure the props and sets we used were at least halfway passable as possible locations for the scenes we were shooting to occur in. We knew it'd be difficult to make our scenes look like we wanted them to, considering that we'd only really be able to shoot at locations around the school, as the school would obviously be an easy place for us to organise ourselves and meet up with everyone we needed to make the trailer, including the various actors we'd need to make the film (we figured it'd be easier to have a lot of actors than to just have the three people in our group somehow do all the roles).

The genre of the film would be action / crime, but we'd only have flashes of action, with most of the content of the trailer being on the crime angle of the film. This would not only make the production of the trailer much easier, but also mean that it would be obvious that the focus was on crime rather than the usual "good vs evil" idea of action films.

Had we been making a film trailer for an actual film, we would've been making it for distribution in multiplex cinemas, before a similar film was shown, and also through internet mediums such as YouTube. The film would be aimed at ages 18 and up, due to the level of violence, the perceived "glorification" of firearms, and the dealing of illegal substances. Gambling would also make up a large part of the plot, contributing to the 18 rating. As far as marketing is concerned, none of us involved are particularly well-known like Ridley Scott or Quentin Tarantino, and we won't be using any particularly famous actors, so we'll be giving the illusion that we're famous by having the names of the main actors flashing up quickly at the end of the trailer. We would've referred to our music video by claiming the film was "From the director of 'Raindrops'", but we agreed that it might be a bit corny so in the end we decided not to.

Analysis of a Film Trailer - Prometheus

Analysis of a Film Trailer: Prometheus

With the Documentary finished, we moved swiftly onto our next area of study - film trailers. We began by picking a film trailer that we were interested in and analysing it, picking out what made it interesting and therefore marketable.

The film trailer I decided to analyse was the trailer for the new Ridley Scott movie, Prometheus.

The title of the film is revealed at the end of the trailer.

Essentially, Prometheus takes place in the same universe as the Alien films, but set before the events in the film occur. Created by the director of the first Alien film, the film explores some of the mysteries surrounding the original film, and this is how it generates intrigue and attracts fans of the original Alien films, whilst also defying many usual film trailer conventions in order to stimulate some kind of curiosity in others who are perhaps not fans of the Alien films, or perhaps have never seen the Alien films at all.

Marine Corps technology, similar to the tech in the second film.

However, it's obvious from the many subtle references and general themes that this will be a film aimed primarily at fans of the old films. The title, first of all, gradually comes into view, with parts of the letters fading in one at a time, in the same way that the title to the original Alien film does. In fact, it does this in such a way that you could be forgiven for thinking that the word that forms at the end would turn out to be "Alien" or something similar, until you realise how many letters are actually forming.

The way the title forms is remarkably similar to the way the title forms in the original Alien films.

Another subtle reference is that, after a few seconds of panicked, unintelligible dialogue, where the actress refers to something being "old, so old", and desperately gasps that she's "sorry," the rest of the trailer has no dialogue at all, and instead simply has the actors either screaming or silent. The soundtrack to the trailer also consists primarily of instruments that sound like a human screaming. It can also be linked to the insanely recogniseable music in the Alien films, in particular to an unnerving track that sounds like the echoing of something lightly tapping the surface of some kind of artificial material. Subtle, but obvious to a fan of the series. These could all be seen as references to the original tagline to the first Alien film - "In space, no one can hear you scream."

A bunch of innocent urns? We all know these are EXACTLY like the eggs in Alien.

Other references to the original Alien films can be seen in the technology - very retro, very much "bright lights and big buttons", as seen in the original films. This extends to a view of cryostasis pods from the original films, and the military hardware seen being driven out of a garage-type area, which look remarkably similar to the vehicles used by the Marine Corps in the second Alien film, Aliens. Another visual connection is the image of a man screaming and clutching his face, which, although covered by a space helmet, seems to be damaged - a reference to the Facehugger of the first film, which attaches itself onto the face of a member of the crew despite the glass casing of their helmet. This is seen directly after a scene of a huge roomfilled with urn-type objects that greatly resemble Alien eggs.

"MY FAAAACE!"

However, the biggest connection to the original Alien film is a sight that is perhaps the biggest mystery in the Alien films entirely - the Space Jockey ship. This iconic spacecraft is seen twice in the Alien films - first at the beginning of Alien, when the crew where the heroine Ripley pick up a strange signal and go to investigate, finding the ship and accidentally becoming exposed to a Facehugger after finding the eggs in the ship, and a second time in the second film, Aliens, where a member of the human colony on the planet from the first film is sent to investigate the coordinates sent to them after Ripley defends her decision to destroy the ship she was on in order to kill the Alien.

Aww yeah, retro technology for the win.

As you can probably tell, this ship is awfully important to the entire storyline of the Alien films, but the fact of the matter is that the films have thusfar been VERY vague about the origins and history of this ship.

omg it's the space jockey ship

And then the trailer for Prometheus appeared.

Showing the Space Jockey ship in the trailer was obviously a decision made on behalf of the director in order to generate the buzz needed to market his film to the correct audience. Though the editing in the trailer is very quick, a few images are easy to pick out, including the seat the original Space Jockey is seen in from the original Alien film. This Jockey was found with it's chest burst. We never saw where the Alien went after it presumably hatched out of the Jockey. Hmmm.

omg it's the seat the space jockey was in

We see the ship crash.

Oh Jesus Christ it's crashing and there are explosions and this can't be good.

And this isn't a small ship either.

"RUNNING RUNNING RUNNING RUNNING RUNNING RUNNING"

This trailer, when it was released, would've probably been the most exciting thing an Alien fan would have seen in many, many years. Sure, Avatar was directed by the director of Aliens, but as far as anyone could tell, it was set in a completely different fictional universe. This film is obviously set in the same one, before the events of the first film, directed by the director of the first film, and explores the mysteries of the film sagas. It even involves actors that resemble the Seargant of the Marine Corps in Aliens and Ripley, the main character of the films. Perhaps the film will unveil the origin of the Alien species? Perhaps Hadley's Hope, the planet the aliens are found on, houses more mysteries than first thought?

As well as this, towards the end of the trailer, the words

"They went looking for our beginning. What they found might be our end."

are shown. Which are fairly interesting. Fans of the Alien series will know that humans do in fact survive afterwards, but that's not the point. It's not the destination, but the journey, that counts when it comes to these films. And from the looks of the trailer, the journey is gonna be a great one.

Documentary Stuff And Things - Finishing The Documentary

Because of the previous problems we'd encountered, the editing process took considerably longer than expected. The footage we had shot was much more basic that the footage we'd hoped to shoot, and the script had to be adjusted to fit the video on screen. Fortunately we had enough footage to make the entire documentary, and we didn't have to go out and capture more footage or anything like that.

Farai would be the one editing this one, despite the fact that he had only used the program maybe once or twice before. However, once he understood the basic principles of using the program, the editing was a fairly quick process. The only problem we encountered in the editing was that, for some odd reason, the images the others had taken on their phones would appear upside down. The process we used to turn them the right way around was fairly inconvenient, so we eventually ended up just not using as many stills as we had originally planned.

Due to the problems we'd had with filming, we were very much pressed for time, and as the deadline approached, we ended up rushing the final product. This gave it a very rough feel, something that wouldn't have happened if we'd perhaps managed our time a little better than we had done.

The documentary was eventually finished on time, and the entire process did teach me some valuable skills I'd need if we were to make any progress in the future, including time management and methods of pre-production planning.

Documentary Stuff And Things - Shooting Problems

As far as I can tell, our group had problems with shooting the documentary right from the start. Firstly, the camera our group was using had also been used by the other Media class, but hadn't been put away to charge properly. We had approximately one or two minutes of recorded footage before the camera died. The exact same thing happened the next time we were supposed to film, so a large amount of time was spent charging the camera rather than actually using it. This single-handedly destroyed our shooting timetable, meaning that we had to improvise and shoot as much as we could as quickly as we could.

Eventually, it was decided to just shoot all the footage we could at the time, and use mobile phones to capture and images we would need to use in the documentary. However, another problem arose - our group was apparently told that filming footage and taking pictures was prohibited inside the Harvey Centre - despite it being a designated public place, and it therefore being completely legal to film footage inside - which meant that the vast majority of our footage was from outside the Harvey Centre, on the High Street, and around the Water Gardens. This in itself wasn't much of a problem, but it did mean that the documentary would lack the variety that we'd hoped to inject with the usage of footage from within the Harvey Centre.

It could have been worse, though.

Documentary Stuff And Things - Research and Planning

Of course, we weren't going to gain a great understanding of the conventions of modern documentaries from only watching one. In fact, "One Day in September" was very different from any documentaries we'd seen in the past, but it was because it was so different that it would be easy for us to pick out any similarities we saw while comparing it to other documentaries. We all went away and watched a variety of different documentaries - mostly nature documentaries, since they were the most widely available and easiest to find, but there were a few variations of subject (Farai, a member of my group, watched a wide array of astronomy documentaries, for example - his blog is located at http://www.blaquamana2.blogspot.com/ ) - and looked closely at how they presented information in an educational, yet entertaining manner.

The main point of this was to see how we could incorporate the basic ideas seen in most good documentaries and apply it to our own. While all the documentaries we saw focussed on vastly different subjects, they all incorporated the same basic principles such as voiceovers and visual elements that we thought would be easy to replicate at a basic level, once we fully understood them. Camera angles, voiceovers, text - all were vastly different from the conventions of music videos that we'd studied, so research into the basic documentary theories (as well as a lot of planning) was necessary in order to produce a half decent documentary.

The planning process took quite a while, but eventually we had a basic idea of what we wanted to do, as well as a rough script and a shooting schedule. We all did small, rough plans, covering different parts of the documentary, before eventually having the final plan written up in one book to keep things organised.

With the research and planning stages done, it was just a matter of shooting and editing the footage together. We were still doing a lot of work in lessons, so we decided to shoot the documentary outside of lessons, where we wouldn't be constrained by time restrictions. At least, not as constrained as if we had an hour to walk to the town centre, shoot the footage we needed, and walk back before the lesson ended.

The other members of my group decided to do it as soon as possible, so we would have all the time we needed to edit the video and get it in before the deadline - however, this meant that for the most part, I would not be on location to assist with the shooting, due to differences in timetables. However, as I mentioned before, this wasn't a great catastrophe, as it had been said from the start that I had had a large part in the production of the music video, and therefore it would make sense for someone else to have a go at directing when it came to the documentary.