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.

Documentary Episode IV: A New Hope

With the music video out of the way, our next production piece would be focussing on making a documentary on one of two predetermined subjects. The subject that we were given was "Harlow: Shopper's Paradise". Since I had played such a large part in the creation of the music video, my role would be fairly smaller, with all the directing, scripting and editing left mainly to the others in the group, with my job basically consisting of doing what the others needed me to do at any given time.

Of course, since no one in the group had ever made a documentary (many had never even seen on in its entirety before), we needed to do some work on understanding the basic theory behind them. To start with, we watched a documentary created by Kevin MacDonald, entitled "One Day in September", which focussed on the murder of 11 Isreali atheletes at the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, Germany.

Shooting the Music Video

With all the planning done, we moved on to the actual filming. Unfortunately we had very little time in which to complete the filming aspect of the music video, so we decided to shoot the music video over the course of one day during a weekend. We managed to get more than enough footage to work with by the end of it, even having enough to miss out entire scenes that we'd shot but didn't have time to fit in.

Here's the music video in all its glory;

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5TAgsZPvDck&feature=channel_video_title

The basic premise is that our main character, who remained nameless (like all the characters in the video) would be dumped by his girlfriend (also nameless). The main character would go through a dark time, wandering aimlessly as he tries desperately to find meaning in the world after the love of his life has left him. There is a lot of time spent watching him descend into the darkness of an underpass, representing his descent into darkness as he feels the world become darker and darker. A section where he looks into the distance while sitting on a bench represents how he looks back to the past, trying to find a way to get things back to the way they are. The video continues with a scene where he sees his nameless friend with his ex, where he climbs to the top of a multi-story car park, looking over the edge, contemplating jumping off. The video concludes with a scene where he walks off into the darkness - since this follows on directly after a shot of him running across the roof of the multi-story car park, it ends on a deliberately ambiguous note, leaving the audience questioning whether he jumped and we're seeing his descent into darkness, or if he is actually just walking down a dark street.

After the editing was finished and it was uploaded to YouTube, we looked back at it and compared it to Andrew Goodwin's theories, as laid out in his book "Dancing in the Distraction Factory." From the offset we'd decided to contradict the lyrics rather than directly represent or amplify them, and this shows - the video has a very dark vibe, as opposed to the fairly uplifting and optimistic theme of the song. This is very prominant when the song reaches the point where the vocalist proclaims that "The blues they send to beat me won't defeat me", which is where the protagonist descends into the darkness of an underpass as he contemplates what to do with his life. Furthermore, there was a focus on one main character, but this was done more to show his reactions to the events happening around him rather than to sell the image of a vocalist or band. There was also a distinct lack of any references to voyeurism or anything like that - the nature of the song and the basic premise left little room for any reference to voyeurism.

Whilst watching it back, and taking into account the thoughts from others in our media class, we realised that we hadn't made the final scene as well as we'd hoped - it wasn't clear that it was supposed to be questionable, and people would either think that the shot was out of sync with the story of the rest of the video, or that he had just decided to walk away rather than jump. This could have been avoided by perhaps having the protagonist fade out of view as he walked away, but we didn't think of that when we were shooting. We also saw that it was painstakingly obvious when we were simply holding the camera rather than using a tripod - the camera was noticeably unsteady whenever the tripod wasn't used, and this caused a huge distinction with the quality of the footage shot using a tripod and the quality of the footage shot without one - obviously we should have used the tripod for every scene (or, at least, a great deal more than we eventually did). Continuity was also a problem - since the footage was shot out of sync throughout the course of a day, some shots were done in the morning, some in the afternoon, some in the evening and some at night, the time of day seemed to change erratically and illogically.

Apart from that, the music video was received fairly positively, with people commenting on the camera angles and the originality of the ideas that went into the video. However, it was noted that a music video that tries to defy conventions being used in our coursework was perhaps not the best idea ever.

All in all, we learnt that it is usually best to have too much footage rather than too little, as we had a lot of footage to go through and were basically able to pick and choose the best parts of what we'd filmed. We also learnt that it is VERY difficult to film steady moving shots, which leads us to believe that we're probably not going to rely on shots where the camera moves when we shoot future tasks. One other lesson we learnt was to spell things out for the audience - whilst we may think that the ideas behind our production pieces are obvious, in the end, we're the ones making it, so of course it's going to be clear for us. Spelling it out for the audience means that they're definitely going to understand the message we're trying to convey, which, in the end, is all we want them to do.

Planning our Music Video

For our Music Video, we took the lessons we'd learned about Goodwin's theories and tried to plan our music video around them, in order to make a semi-professional looking music video. Since it was our first attempt at a music vide, we were given a song at random - the songs were all classic like "Feeling Good" and "Magic Moments," with lyrics that were fairly easy to decipher and make a story out of, or just a video that corresponded to the music and lyrics somehow. They were fairly well known by most of us, so it was a decent selection of songs that we had at our disposal.

Our group were given the song "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on my Head", by B. J. Thomas. The general gist of the song was an upbeat look at the life of an optimistic man, whose life is filled with misery, but through it all he keeps on smiling, looking on the bright side of life at all times. Since we were aware of the fact that another group may be doing the same song, we decided to make our video contrast to the lyrics somewhat. We agreed to make the video about a teenage relationship that goes sour, and ends with the main character killing himself. It was a pretty dark concept, but we thought it was pretty far away from the lyric, and therefore was a good contrast to the happy, light feeling of the song.

We immediately drew up a basic idea of what we wanted to do, and elaborated on one idea a little further, adding a quick storyboard so that we knew exactly what we wanted to do with it;

After our initial planning, with the basic ideas and shots noted down in detail, we made a series of storyboards to illustrate what we hoped to film. After making a short list of the main shots we wanted, we drew the storyboards and took photos of them to upload to our blogs.

We used these storyboards to get a basic idea of what we wanted to do with the music video.

In short, the idea was that the main protagonist would be dumped by his girlfriend at the beginning of the video, and the rest of the video would show the events that take place afterwards. The protagonist would be left completely miserable,