We established that our trailer
would be a hybrid genre of a coming of age film and also a thriller.
We decided on these two in
particular after conducting our secondary research of other trailers popular
with our chosen target audience of teenagers and young adults, such as ‘I am
number four’, ‘How I live now’ and ‘Abduction’.
All of these are hybrid genres
containing conventions of both coming of age and thriller genres.
We also conducted some primary
market research, asking some other teenagers around Sixth form which genres of
films they would generally go and see at the cinema.
We explored ideas of thrillers,
incorporating elements of schizophrenia and mental distress leading to a
distressed teenage girl at the heart of our story.
We conducted quantitative and qualitative
research by looking at the success other films within the same genre as ours
such as ‘The perks of being a wallflower’ leading us to establish the budget of
our production and what status of actors would be most suitable to fill our
roles.
This research made us come to the
decision that our production would most likely be mid-budget film with B and C
list celebrities like in some of the trailers we analysed such as ‘How I live
now’.
We adhered to the conventions of teaser
trailers by using a soundtrack that began deep and slow initially and gradually
built up in pace up until the point of disruption.
We also reduced the time of our
trailer to just over a minute long, similar to one of the teaser trailers that
we analysed ‘Gravity’, which was 1:31 seconds long and ours was 1:14 seconds
long.
We also took inspiration from
changes in the music. In Gravity the music begins slow and speeds up at the
point of disruption where there is a large explosion.
We have done similar with our
trailer as we also have a large explosion at the point when the music changes
and becomes more intense.
We used this as our point of
disruption following the trailer conventions featured in Tzvetan Todorov’s
theory of narrative exposition.
We used actors and actresses to
play the roles of the three main character’s Grace, Charlie and Zara and also a
group of extras to fill out the larger scenes such as the house party, the
assembly and the classroom scenes.
We feel that the artists we chose
to fill the roles did a really good job.
We deliberately chose three
completely contrasting people to play three completely contrasting characters.
Grace’s character needed to be
vulnerable, innocent and naïve; we feel that our actress Clare did a really
good job performing very naturally in all situations.
Zara needed to be fierce, confident
and loyal; we feel that our Actress Sophie truly did the part justice bringing
a lot of her own personality to the role. This made the character all that more
relatable.
Charlie is Grace’s rock he needs to
be brave, determined and responsible in order to care for Grace and keep Zara’s
temper at bay. We feel our actor Sam gave a very compassionate and emotive
performance providing the audience with a character that really pulls at the
heart strings.
We utilized the following media
theorists when creating the trailer, Tzvetan Todorov’s theory of narrative
exposition by showing all the action up until the point of the resolution, in
the case of fallen grace there are several points of disruption, one point is
the explosion and another is when Grace is tied up in the basement. We also
adhered to Vladimir Propps theory of character functions. We had a protagonist
in the form of our main character Grace; we also used some role reversal by
having our main protagonist as a female and the antagonist as an older male
teacher.
The representations of the
characters used were appropriate for the task as we had a protagonist, Grace as
well as an antagonist, Mr Eastwood. This created the binary opposition between
good and evil, encouraging the audience to route for Grace. Our supporting
roles were Zara and Charlie, who fill the roles of the sidekicks aiding the
main protagonist in defeating the antagonist.
