St Bede's Media A level: G324 Advanced Portfolio

Brief:

Film Trailer

A promotional package for a new film, to include a teaser trailer, together with the following :

· A film magazine front cover, featuring the film.

· A poster for the film

Research and Planning

You need to show evidence of research into:

the media language (structure, editing, use of sound, camera, etc) of trailers.
the genre and narrative of film noir, the representation of the characters.

Some good examples of film noir trailers:

Drive (2011)

This is a classic Noir tough guy: soft spoken, calm, thoughtful, but never on the defensive and ready to do whatever it takes at a moment’s notice.

The Los Angeles streets and back alleys are once again a classic backdrop for the Noir visual style.

Use of sound is also redolent of film noir.

Memento (2000)

One of Christopher Nolan’s, it has Noir written all over it. Murder, classic Noir visual style, an unreliable narrator and non-linear plot, you name it and it’s here.

To top it all off (without giving too much away), in classic Noir style, we find out in the big twist that our “hero” was doomed from the start.

Format

You also need to show you have researched into teaser trailers as that is the format you are creating. You should show your analysis of structure, narrative and style of the teaser.

Shorter in length than full theatrical.
May only focus on one element.
May not be contextualised.
Editing of footage to soundtrack.
Introduces key characters.
May not feature actual film footage.

Examples of teaser trailers:

You should include some comments to contextualise your inclusion choices: say why you have uploaded the trailers; pick out the elements you are influenced by; want to use or feel particularly exemplify the conventions of a teaser trailer.

It is also useful to look at some of the other trailers on Vimeo.

https://vimeo.com/search?q=film+noir+trailer

Notice how many are there to raise funds to finish the film through crowd funding (something social media has been essential in creating). This is different to your usual Hollywood trailer which is there to advertise the finished film.
There are lots of examples of real film noir trailers, mostly for independent film companies. This means they are more arthouse rather than Hollywood blockbusters and so more likely to feature conventions you could emulate.

TAIL-JOB trailer by Mario Vrbancic from Jelena Kupsjak on Vimeo.
Tail job is an experimental neo-noir film in which a loser stand-up comedian is hired to trail a mysterious stranger and gets involved in series of murders.

We are currently crowd funding on Indiegogo so that the film can be finished. You can find out everything about our campaign by visiting the link http://igg.me/at/TailJob/x/3166335

If you like it, pleas visit our site, share with your friends and contribute!

It would be useful for you to look at trailers that other A2 students have made that got good grades.

This is from Norwich High School. It's a teen psycological thriller. It got an A grade. You can also see the poster and magazine pages that accompany it when you go to the Youtube site.

Audience research

You need to look at the audiences of film noir/neo noir. Use the certification on real media texts as well as figures from the film council to inform you.

Planning
Mood Board

Create a board of characters/mise en scene/props/images that you feel you would like to include in your trailer.

Synopses choices
Use the selection of synopses provided to give you a focus for your trailer (or create your own).

Pitch
Create a pitch to show your ideas. This is a good way of researching into your audince reactions.

Scripting
The following was taken from The International Movie Trailer Festival here
There are LOADS of trailers to analyse.

The Patterns

Now, with your story in mind, you’re ready to go shopping for a pattern you’ll use to make your trailer. The examples used to illustrate each pattern are drawn from the International Movie Trailer Festival’s “Preview Your Dreams” filmmaking contest. (www.imtf.biz).

Pattern 1. The “Character-Driven” Trailer

This pattern features the main characters appearing in your story. Although some character-driven trailers feature several characters, focusing on a single figure can be riveting.
Write a brief description for each character you plan to shoot. You can later use this text for your voice over or superimposed titles. Here, for example, are possible character descriptions for a King Kong trailer:

A beauty with one talent: she can scream.
A shrewd operator willing to put a city at risk to make a fortune.
An ape who can knock planes out of the sky, but can’t resist a blonde who fits into one of his paws.

In some trailers, each character is presented solo; in others two or more of the characters will appear together in dramatic situation.
To make an effective faux trailer using this formula, you’ll need to find actors who embody your vision. For the sake of economy you can often omit spoken dialogue. Costumes, make-up, and props go a long way to creating dramatic characters, as you’ll see in these examples from the international movie trailer festival:

Pattern 2. The “Plot-Driven” Trailer

This form—which works well with action-filled movies—requires identifying several plot points that suggest the storyline. A plot point could involve characters talking. But if you include too much dialogue you risk ending up with a trailer that’s talky and slow.
A completed plot-driven movie, almost always involves dozens of locations. However, because shooting in many locations takes time and resources, generally you’ll want to film your plot-driven trailer in just one or a few places. Hint: Many filmmakers use fade-outs so that they can stage different actions in the same location. The fade out suggests that time has past.
You might worry that building a trailer out of only a few scenes will limit your ability to convey the story. But there’s a greater danger in including too many actions. We’ve all watched trailers that reveal so much of the story there’s no reason to see the movie. The old adage “less can be more” is especially relevant when producing a trailer.

Pattern 3. The “Trigger-Event” Trailer

One classic storytelling strategy is to introduce a huge and unexpected element that changes everything. It could be the arrival in town of a ruthless gunslinger or the discovery that an asteroid is heading toward Earth.
In this pattern, you first need to show the world as it is—people going about their ordinary lives—and then introduce the disruptive element as in the following IMTF examples, the first in the science fiction genre, the second a comedy:

Pattern 4. The “Theme-Centered” Trailer.

Among his many pronouncements, movie producer Samuel Goldwyn is remembered for saying, “Pictures are for entertainment, messages should be delivered by Western Union.” Nevertheless, just about every memorable movie has a message—its theme. You can create a gripping trailer by focusing on what the story is about.
Thematic trailers present issues such as revenge, fear, courage, paranoia, or justice. While the theme approach can work for fiction, it’s especially appropriate for documentaries.

Mixing & Matching
When it comes to using story patterns, you don’t have to be a purist. Character-driven movie trailers may include exciting actions, just as trigger-event trailers may be built around strong themes. Ultimately your trailer will be judged on one criterion: Does it make the audience want to see more?

The trailer transcript

This is an example from a blog used in the OCR training materials:

Note how it shows the drafting process.

Storyboarding

It's essential you thoroughly plan your trailer and show the evidence on your blog.

Here is a blank storyboard you could use. You should be creating a frame for each frame you intend to use in the trailer.

Animated storyboard

To create an animated story board use the sketches you have made, photograph them and edit them together on Moviemaker.
Here's a tutorial:

You can make more than one. Use the stills from your location recces and footage from your rushes to make further drafts.

Poster analysis

Thanks to Porchester School. It's designed for GCSE but the conventions are exactly the same.

Using light:

This link has some good ideas for lighting cheats.

Evaluation

A2 Coursework Evaluation

Coursework: Advanced Portfolio

60 construction (40 trailer; 10 poster; 10 magazine cover)

20 research and planning

20 EVALUATION

How to approach it…

Needs to be:

Formal & sophisticated but this does not mean that you have to restrict yourself simply to writing an essay. Indeed the exam board expect you to use initiative and resourcefulness so try to use any combination of the following. You do not need to adopt an identical approach for all four areas of the evaluation.

• text with photos/screenshots to illustrate the points being made

• link to Youtube edit of your trailer which includes ‘director’s commentary’ style recording

• video recording of you delivering a powerpoint on your trailer and responding to a Q&A session

• video/sound recordings of feedback to your trailer

• video/sound recordings of you discussing your ideas

• Embed links to relevant material (ie other trailers etc and articles etc) within your text but don’t overload the reader with too much primary data (ie copies of all the responses to audience questionnaires) and instead focus on your reading and analysis of this sort of primary data.

There is no word limit

MARK SCHEME Level 4 16–20 marks

There is excellent understanding of the forms and conventions used in the productions.

• There is excellent understanding of the role and use of new media in various stages of the production.

• There is excellent understanding of the combination of main product and ancillary texts.

• There is excellent understanding of the significance of audience feedback.

• There is excellent skill in choice of form in which to present the evaluation.

• There is excellent ability to communicate.

• There is excellent use of digital technology or ICT in the evaluation.

In the evaluation the following questions must be answered:

1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Task: Select 10 stills/ images from your trailer and the 2 ancillary tasks. Annotate each one of them in Photoshop or Powerpoint to indicate which conventions you have used at which point.

- Discuss your research into trailers and their conventions. Identify (and link to) specific trailers that influenced your own work. Emphasise what you have found out rather than how you conducted your research.

- Discuss your research into the ‘theory of trailers

- Discuss how/why your film relates to the conventions that you have identified. Try to identify areas where you have followed conventions and areas where you have challenged them. Don’t ignore conventions just because you think they are obvious. Where you have departed radically from conventions, try to give some sense of the reasons behind your choices.

- - Although you should be mostly concerned with technical conventions ie the structure of trailers, you might also be able to explore:

-o to what extent your trailer conforms with genre expectations,

-o to what extent the representation of characters conforms with or challenges stereotypes and

-o to what extent are the narrative theories of Prop/Todorov/Levi-Strauss etc etc relevant/interesting in relation to the narrative of the trailer. Is it possible to even consider your trailer as a narrative??

-- You should follow the same steps for your film posters and magazine covers.

Help: The question is asking you to compare the genre conventions you used in your 3 tasks to those used in real trailers/posters and magazine covers. Each of the slides you select should illustrate your use of a particular convention

2. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

Task: Create a Prezi which makes clear links between your 3 products.

try to set out how you hoped the texts would work alongside each other and how they would relate to each other in the overall timetable for marketing your film. How will the 3 pieces combine to address the target audience? At what stage in the film’s marketing will the three texts (trailer, poster, magazine cover) be used and do the three texts therefore perform different functions in the overall marketing of the film?

- Remember that ‘effectiveness’ is really measured here by about how effective the texts are in reaching and addressing the target audience. To measure this, you need to refer to audience feedback that you have conducted.

Help: Consider to what extent you have created an effective promotional package for your film. How have you used mise en scene, motifs, themes, composition etc to present a particular image of your character/narrative/enigma? What do you think the expectations of your target audience are for each of your products and the package as a whole? Do you think you have met these expectations?

3. What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Task: Create a director’s commentary which includes clips from the music video and ancillary tasks, as well as vox-pop presentations of audience feedback.

- This speaks for itself. However, I should emphasise that the lessons you learn cannot simply about how many people liked it/really liked it/loved it etc. You need to identify what your audience seemed to be looking for in a trailer/poster and how you were able to develop your ideas in response to audience feedback etc. Try to be as specific as possible. Teacher feedback should be one element of this but you should not focus on this at the expense of more general feedback.

In the response to Q3 it is essential that you discuss (in text, audio or video) what you have learned from audience feedback. It is not enough to simply dump some video/audio of friends discussing it. You must discuss what you found out about their expectations and what you learned about your own productions. Ideally you should also be discussing the ways in which you developed your own work (or at very least how you would like to develop your own work) in response to this feedback. You should refer not just to these videos but should also discuss polls, teacher feedback, comments on your blog etc.

Help: Consider all the forms of audience feedback you have received as well as all methods and contexts for gathering it. Start by making a list of all of the types of feedback you have received, the context in which you received it, methodology and whether you found it useful/ whether you acted on it:
eg. Rough Cut Feedback/ other group feedback on blog/ qualitative/ we added more filters to the video to add genre authenticity.

4. How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Task: Create a video presentation which discusses the technologies you used at each stage of the project. This video needs to be different from the Director’s commentary in terms of its presentation and content ie. Presented as a ‘How to use…’/ Teaching (in character?) style of video that could then be used as a future teaching aid.

- discuss the way you used your blog to organize your research and planning work and how you used it to showcase your production

- discuss your use of the internet to research into trailers and their conventions. How did you search? Did you leave any questions on message boards? Did you create polls? Did you use your own social networking sites (ie Facebook) to generate any initial research data?

- discuss how you generated responses to your work through polls and the ‘comments’ section of

- how did you make use of photography in planning your trailer

- how did your camera/editing skills develop as your trailer progressed? What specific skills did you need to master?

- How did you use photography, Photoshop, Publisher etc to create your posters and magazine covers. Which specific skills did you need to master?

- How did you use video/sound recording to get audience feedback?

- How did you use Powerpoint to help evaluate and present your work?

Useful Links

Wikipedia - Teaser Trailer

Wikipedia - Trailer (film)

AWJF Opinion Poll - All About Movie Trailers

Definitions of Different Trailer Types

What is a Teaser Trailer?