For my practical production I worked within a group of four people to create a
Hollywood horror movie trailer called ‘The pulse of darkness’. Since we have
used the word ‘darkness’ in our title, it was important for us to emphasis this
within our trailer by using many of our low key lighting shots in order to convey
this to the audience. Our trailer revolves around a female protagonist who is
also the villain of our story, out to get her vengeance on the woman who
destroyed her life causing her to turn to the ‘darkness’ for her sanctuary. The
audience that we will target will be working class female adults of all ethnicities since our trailer will portray two females in the key roles with one
being Caucasian and the other being Asian, while being set in an urban
working class area therefore serving a purpose of personal identity in some
form.
As we have chosen to produce a Hollywood trailer we’ve used ‘20th Century
Fox’ as our institution as it is recognised as a usual Hollywood institution and
this therefore gives our trailer an authentic look which may appeal to our
target audience due to the fact that they may have a liking for Hollywood films.
Our working title to start off with was ‘Blind Date’ and we began to realise that
throughout the editing process the narrative of our trailer had to be altered
since we decided to replace our lighter shots with our low key lighted ones in
order to relate our trailer with the study of ‘film noir’, therefore removing key
elements of the proposed storyline. This was also useful for us to create a
sense of enigma within the trailer in order to keep the target audience on edge
and eager to view the film on its release and also to relate our work to Barthes
theory of gripping the audience throughout the text by using enigma codes.
We decided that the best way to go about our editing was for the whole group
to be present during each editing session as we found that when we tried to
work separately, there were aspects of our trailer that other group members
did not like or differed on. By all of us being there we were able to give an
equal input into our production and make mutual decisions such as changing
the narrative of the trailer to make it better suited to the genre.
However, we also found that the music that we had chosen to accompany our
trailer was not parallel to the final product and therefore did not link to the
genre. My job was to therefore search for music that was better suited to our
trailer and luckily within a day I was able to come across some useful piece
of music and sound effects that juxtaposed well with our narrative.
We were also given constructive criticism and were told that in
order to give a real representation of Hollywood, we would have to add an
authentic Hollywood institution to our trailer and this is when we decided to
choose ‘20th Century Fox’ as this has been an institute for successful horror
movies throughout the years such as ”The Omen” (1976) and “The Hills Have
Eyes” (2006). Hasnaa then took the responsibility of finding the institution and adding it to our work. I took the responsibility of structuring our trailer and estimating which shot was worth keeping to make it appealing to our target audience. Lamia and Valeria were mainly on hand as our technical helpers and were very accommodating when it came to working the Adobe Premiere Pro which made it easier for us to complete our trailer on time. They also gave their personal input into the production. By working closely together we were able to gain a sense of group achievement.
As we have seen in many Hollywood movie trailers the use of a voiceover has
always been present, but we decided that it would be interesting if we did not
follow this stereotype and let our trailer be self explanatory through it’s linear
narrative with the help of titles in between shots to stimulate the minds of our
audiences and draw them in to find our more about the film. However, our
montage sequence does not involve any titles in between or any music,
instead we have used the sound of a heartbeat which slowly builds up the
tension leading to the revelation of the film’s title.
We decided to open our trailer with an establishing shot of the setting in order
to grab the viewers attention and then led this to shots of the villain in a vague
image in order to create enigma. We then wanted to change the speed of the trailer from slow to fast so that we could offer something more interesting to
our audience. This proved to be very successful as when we had the mentors
view it, they agreed with this decision and admitted that it kept them hooked
on the trailer to see what would happen next.
Once our production was complete we found that one of the shots that we
used were a little too dark and therefore could confuse the audience in
recognising the image that they are seeing. Another weakness that we found
in our final piece was that the montage sequence may have been a bit too
long and may also seem give the audience a chance to lose interest in the
events occurring. However, we feel that it may be useful in building tension
and enigma as many other horror trailers do.
The strengths of our production I was the soundtrack. We found that
when people viewed it they were first to comment on the impact that the
soundtrack had on trailer. We also felt a great sense of authenticity when we
saw the opening of our trailer as it involved usual Hollywood conventions of a
trailer’s opening such as the representation of our institution of ‘20th Century
Fox’ and the establishing shot as we had seen many times throughout our research of horror movie trailers.
As I wrote in my brief, even though the narrative of our production has
changed we still believe that it would be a movie most likely to appear on
channel 4 or ITV as it still appeals to a more younger variety of audience and
those who seek to be entertained as well as informed therefore accepting
violence in their movies as a form of entertainment.
Farah Khan
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