Evaluation

Genre and Conventions

For the A2 media assignment we decided to create a teaser trailer in the teen drama genre. We wanted the production to have the look and feel of a British independent art-house film rather than the high gloss of a Hollywood blockbuster.

We researched trailers for films such as ‘Thirteen’, ‘This England’ and also watched trailers and episodes of the television series Skins; produced by Company Pictures for E4.

There are a number of conventions used in this genre which help the audience relate to the movie. Use of a handheld camera and point of view shots draw the audience into the action and make them feel they are seeing what is actually happening. Facial close-ups are used to depict emotions and tight shots of couples restrict the on screen action to a narrow viewpoint.
Teaser trailers are by convention 30 seconds long and give the audience enough information about the film to decide whether it’s their type of movie, but without giving much clue to the actual plot. This convention is not however rigid, as the 2 minute teaser for Avatar proved; Avatar is now tipped to be the most successful movie of all time having grossed £460 million in its first two weeks of release.

By contrast, the 30 second trailer for Lukas Moodysson’s film ‘Lilja 4 Ever’ is very enigmatic, it shows the viewer a close-up range of emotions without actually allowing any kind of insight into whether the film is about happiness or sadness or any point in between.

We wanted to tell the story of a teenage girl’s conflicting personalities whose life was taking a downwards spiral. We decided on “Spiral” for the film’s title. The central character Lindsey Pryce was played by Jennie Lingham-Doe.

To make the trailer fast paced and enigmatic, we edited our footage as a series of fast jump cuts to construct a visual montage in the same way as the trailer for ‘Lilja 4 Ever’. We tried to enhance this by cutting the to the beat of our soundtrack.

The trailer focuses on the central character, there is very little footage which shows any supporting cast. However, rather than shooting the central character simply in a series of situations, we decided to include footage which suggested ideas and situations but allowed the audience to construct its own narrative around them. To achieve this we exported video frames into Adobe Photoshop and edited them to look like abstract sketched which were then used as opening shots for the narrative montage sequences.

Some of the teaser trailers we researched such as Shane Meadow’s ‘This England’ included quotes from reviews of the film. By convention these break out of the trailer as white text on a black background. For our trailer we decided to use still photographs of urban landscapes as a backdrop to review quotes in white type to make them stand out from the background.

For the trailer’s final sequence we constructed a collage of photographs depicting the central character’s life. For this we used baby pictures and old school photographs of Jennie. The sequence was shot in-camera using a slow zoom out from a single photograph, to reveal the collage of photographs together with the name and two dates - leaving the audience in no doubt that this is a memorial but still unsure about the who, what or why ? Hopefully they would want to see the whole film to find their own answers to these questions.

Branding

The title of the film is Spiral. The storyline is dark and dismal, telling the story of a teenager’s downward spiral into a world of alcohol and drugs; eventually leading to her death.

Much of the trailer’s footage is dark with unsaturated colours. To reinforce this we chose dark backgrounds for the poster and magazine cover. We chose the font Courier which looks like a typewriter, suggesting to the audience that this could be an official typed medical or police report. To contrast with the dark backgrounds we chose to set all type across the main and ancillary texts in white.

When designing a poster for the film we knew we wanted to portray the idea of the central character’s two personalities and felt two contrasting pictures of the character could convey this. However, we did not want it to look like it was a film about twins. When looking for ideas we came across a picture of the character ‘Effy’ from the teen drama series ‘Skins’. We liked the style of the photo and we used this as the basis of our poster idea. Below is the photo of Effy:

We originally decided to have two images of Jennie standing side by side and dressed in two different outfits to convey the character’s two personalities. However, we developed this idea by using a wall in between the two images to suggest a barrier between the personalities. The pictures were shot using studio flash lighting and all members of the Group were involved in shooting, make-up and production of the photos. We had to make sure Jennie’s pose was the same for both shots as for the final poster we wanted to have the character’s hands pushing against each other to show conflict.

The character is wearing two very different outfits. The first is plain. She is dressed in a fully buttoned shirt, her hair in bunches, she has little make-up, and she is wearing a hat. She looks like she has not made an effort and does not care about her appearance. As a complete contrast for the second shot the character appears much more glamorous. She is wearing a dress, heavy jewellery and her hair is down. She is also wearing much more make-up to look like she may be dressed for a party.

We spent a lot of time editing the photographs to find two which complimented each other – particularly the facial expressions – so we could show the two sides of the character’s personality. Using Adobe Photoshop one of the photographs was flipped horizontally and the two pictures were then composited to create the final image. We had be careful to make both pictures the same size and to line up Jennie’s hands so she appeared to be pushing against herself.

To reinforce the concept of a single character with two opposing personalities and to add weight to the film’s title, we added the strap line “One teenage life, locked in a downward spiral” above the picture. The poster also includes the typical conventions of a film poster, with a billing block, review quotes, BBFC age certificate and the various film distributors’ logos. Below is our final poster image:

The accompanying magazine cover is in the house style of specialist film magazine Empire. We used the magazine’s iconic masthead and included other recognisable cover elements such as bar code, price, cover lines and issue date. Researching past issues of Empire magazine we found that rather than promotional stills of famous actors, Empire magazine prefers to feature the actual character’s from the films it features for example Wolverine and The Joker. We used the Spiral logo in the courier font across the photograph of Jennie in-character as Lindsey Pryce. For continuity and branding she is dressed the same as she appears on the poster which we all felt made an eye catching cover shot. Below is the final magazine cover image:

Audience Feedback
We showed our rough first cut to a selection of people from our target audience. The feedback from the questionnaires indicated that our genre wasn’t instantly recognisable and our story line wasn’t very clear.

Our original trailer concept included a rewind clip which we thought showed the character reflecting back on her life, however the audience did not feel this was clear. Also when researching other teaser trailers we did not find one where the rewind section contained exactly the same camera shots.

We could have opted to re-shoot some of the rewind sequence from alternate angles, but it was not clear from our audience feedback that this would have made the concept any clearer. Therefore we decided to add a voice over where the central character describes how the girl is feeling by saying “I felt like I was losing my mind”.

We also felt that including extra shots to suggest drinking and drug taking which could be familiar or at least recognisable to our target audience.

We also shot a new sequence where the central character showed the two sides of her character to make the storyline clearer while still retaining a slightly enigmatic and montage approach to the trailer.

The audience feedback showed that the audience liked the soundtrack and thought it added tension to the trailer.

Use Of New Media
At all stages of this project, we used new media technologies to research, plan and construct our work.

Our main source for research was the Internet, as it provided us with a huge amount of information and was easy to access. The main websites we used were IMBD, Pearl and Dean and Youtube to research our chosen genre and view trailers in a similar field.

We took montage ideas from Lilja 4 Ever, the use of review quotations from This England and hand-held point of view camera work from Skins, all of which we were able to research on Youtube.

We shot our video footage using a digital video camera which allowed us to import our work directly into Final Cut Express for editing. As the different elements were shot under different lighting conditions – dull daylight, bright daylight, fluorescent lighting and tungsten lighting we were able to colour correct our project for continuity using the ‘colour corrector’ function.
During editing in Final Cut we were also able to speed up some shots and add a blur effect to the shots of the people dancing at the party. This adds distortion and creates a sense of confusion enhancing the idea that the character is under the influence of drugs or alcohol.

The sequence depicting the two sides to the central character’s personality was shot with the character wearing two different costumes. The footage was imported into Final Cut Express and a fade transition applied to blend the shots into one sequence.

We freeze framed the opening frames of some of the video sequences and exported them as digital stills. These were opened in Adobe Photoshop as a background layer and duplicated to create a new layer above the original image. The ‘find edges’ filter was then applied to the new layer which made the picture look like an abstract pencil sketch. Changing the blending mode of the sketch layer to Vivid Light allowed some of the colour and detail of the original photograph to be seen. The images were then saved as TIFF files and imported back into the video project. Below is an example of one of the still images:

Stills for the poster and magazine cover were shot using a digital stills camera and studio flash lighting.

The two photographs for the poster were composited using Adobe Photoshop. The cover for Empire magazine was designed in Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator.
We used the Apple software package Live Type to add the titles to our trailer and the reviewers’ quotes.

We also used the Apple Soundtrack a digital audio editing software package to create the music soundtrack to the trailer. We made sure it was fast paced and had a heavy bass beat to add drive to the trailer.