The film has
received excellent reviews in the national press.
'A dizzying and exciting time-travel thriller in which an assassin has to hunt himself down'
Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian
Henry Barnes, The Guardian Online: Rian Johnson's thriller about hitmen who assassinate targets sent from the future opened the Toronto film festival in fine style and runs rings around most recent sci-fi releases
'It’s impossible not to be tickled by the playful logic of Rian Johnson’s Looper,
a fashionably sleek, unfashionably smart science-fiction film that
tick-tick-ticks along with pocket-watch precision.' Robbie Collin, The Daily Telegraph
I will meet you inside the foyer of the cinema by 6 o/c
and will release you to make your own way home after the showing. You will
need money for travel and tickets (about £10) and other essentials like popcorn.
Showing posts with label teaser trailers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label teaser trailers. Show all posts
Monday, 1 October 2012
Media Studies Trip to see Looper
It is important
you have contemporary case studies to write about in your exam and thus I have organised a trip to see ‘Looper’ at The
Ritzy Cinema in Brixton on Tuesday the 2nd October. The film starts
at 18:20 and should finish by about 21:00.
Monday, 24 September 2012
Another New Thriller...
'
'This black comedy about unhappy assassins who have hit hard times is a compelling comment on economic bloodletting in the real world.' The Guardian
'Killing Them Softly, starring Brad Pitt, is a bleakly electrifying hit-man thriller.' The Telegraph
'This black comedy about unhappy assassins who have hit hard times is a compelling comment on economic bloodletting in the real world.' The Guardian
'Killing Them Softly, starring Brad Pitt, is a bleakly electrifying hit-man thriller.' The Telegraph
Monday, 17 September 2012
Tuesday, 25 October 2011
Weeks 10 -16 Schedule: TRAILERS - YEAR 13
AIM: TO HAVE A ROUGH CUT OF YOUR TRAILER BY XMAS
How to achieve this:
The following should have been completed by the end of WEEK 9:
- sorted out any inconsistencies, bits missing etc.. on your blog to date
- completed all the Locations research - including photos and analysis
- completed all the character research (similar intertextual characters) and costumes/ props
- completed a strong, detailed shot list - include the script, the length of each shot and the spaces for graphics - also I would start to include ideas for transitions between shots or in shots
- completed a storyboard (keep very clear and in ink - for later animatics)
- completed a full and detailed recee with voice-over - close attention to sound and lighting
SECOND HALF OF ADVENT TERM:
Complete planning and embark on filming of trailer and edit a rough cut
- animate the storyboard
- Sound research
- Graphics research - both for the trailer and for idents
- studio research / distribution company
- Transitions/ Filters/ Effects research
FILM THE TRAILER - book out equipment well in advance using Alyson's booking sheets
Allow more than one day for filming - split up the scenes so as not to get too tired
Remember to take extra shots, cut-aways, a range of angles, establishing shots
Remember to synch the sound and video and to test!
I have noted all this so that some of you can move forward in certain areas when you are ready. We will be discussing these aspects in further detail in class.
Important: Keep all your progress documented regularly on your blog!
AML
Tuesday, 14 June 2011
Trailer Research - AM LEGG
PLEASE COMPLETE THESE NOTES AND POST ON YOUR BLOGS FOR Tuesday 21st JUNE
Watch this trailer and make notes on the questions beneath
1) What cinematic techniques are used to establish mood and tone?
2)How does the trailer establish the themes and narrative?
3) How does the trailer establish genre?
4) Who is the target audience and how is this audience targeted in this trailer?
5) What is the reason/ effect for using the director's name and previous work?
SALT
Watch this trailer and make notes on the following questions:
1) How does this trailer promote and focus on the big star? (look at camera work, editing, sound...etc..)
2) Action films are thought to appeal to a predominately male audience. How does this trailer target both a female and male audience separately?
3) How does this trailer use editing to create atmosphere?
Heartbreaker
Look at these different trailers and make notes on the difference between them and the reasons for these differences
- Look at the different tone - the editing, sound (especially v/o), camera shots
The UK release trailer:
The very different European release Trailer
French Teaser Trailer
Thursday, 16 September 2010
Trailer Production Timetable - an example (AMLEGG)
Week 1 + 2
Alongside prior research into similar media texts:
- - clear conventions of genre
- - clear conventions of the teaser trailer
- - influences and creative ideas
Week 3
(13-17thSeptember)
Target audience and audience research
- Present findings electronically
- Overview of narrative and nonlinear narrative plan
Week 4, 5 + 6
(20th-8thOctober)
See List for pre-production research and planning
- Get early recee date for locations
- Book equipment out in advance and book actors for filming in advance
Week 7 and Half Term
(11th – 31stOctober)
CONSTRUCTION
- Filming for production
- A number of days – not all at once
- Also book time for pick-ups
- Update Blogs with all planning materials
- Update blog with skills acquired during filming (for Exam unit)
Week 10
(1st -5thNovember)
Final week of construction – get pick-ups
- Log footage carefully and up-load onto Final Cut for editing
Week 11, 12, 13, 14
(8th – 3rdDecember)
Post – Production
- Editing and improving your knowledge of Final Cut.
- Separate Sound editing and Improved Graphics work.
- Keep detailed blog on decisions and revisions
Week 15
(6th-10thDecember)
Another period of audience research – pilot your trailer and see what views are before finishing in post-production
Week 16
13th + 14thDecember
Update notes for blog on transitions/graphics/ sound editing
- Only two days this week before end of term things start.
TRAILER COMPLETE: TUESDAY 14thDecember
Tuesday, 29 June 2010
Cover Lesson Wed 30th June 2010 Period 6
You need to catch up with all this work. Some have you are behind. Please sort out this material and ensure that you have done all these things for me by Friday:
1) Update your blogs with your notes on the trailers we have analysed so far (including Winter's Bone, Boy called Dad, Dark Knight
2) Update your blogs with your homework which I set and was due in last week! I am still waiting for work from Jordan and Livi (please email me this also). The trailers for analysis are on the Alleyn's Blog site here
3) This week's homework was to : choose your own theatrical trailer and teaser trailer and make notes on how it fulfills the list of trailer conventions which we wrote down last lesson. I would suggest that you look at a genre which interests you. This analysis should be handed into me on Friday.
Work hard. I will be looking at your blogs and checking my email for work this evening.
My email address is: leggam@alleyns.org.uk
1) Update your blogs with your notes on the trailers we have analysed so far (including Winter's Bone, Boy called Dad, Dark Knight
2) Update your blogs with your homework which I set and was due in last week! I am still waiting for work from Jordan and Livi (please email me this also). The trailers for analysis are on the Alleyn's Blog site here
3) This week's homework was to : choose your own theatrical trailer and teaser trailer and make notes on how it fulfills the list of trailer conventions which we wrote down last lesson. I would suggest that you look at a genre which interests you. This analysis should be handed into me on Friday.
Work hard. I will be looking at your blogs and checking my email for work this evening.
My email address is: leggam@alleyns.org.uk
Monday, 21 December 2009
A2 Advanced Production - Guardian Article on Film Trailers
The new rebel film trailers
Movie trailers used to be pretty formulaic – just show the best bits – but, in the age of the internet viral, they're now works of art in themselves.
If you're looking for art or auteurship at the cinema, you're likely to be waiting for the main feature, not concentrating on the trailers for what were quaintly known as "coming attractions". As long as they have existed, trailers have been the tool of film marketing departments aiming solely to secure the maximum number of bums on seats. Experimentation with the form has not been a big part of the story. There have been brief flourishes of artistic advancement, such as the move towards fast-edit montages led by Kubrick in the early 1960s, and periodical oddities, like Hitchcock's personally hosted guided tour of the Bates Motel for Psycho, and the mock advertisement for the Ghostbusters' services, which led to the advertised phone number taking 1,000 calls an hour for six weeks in 1984. But the vast majority of studio-financed trailer-makers have played it safe, their audience-tested trailers following the basic three-act rule of set-up, jeopardy and emotional- or action-based blow-out.
Now, however, thanks mainly to that feral little monster, the internet, and one of its most recent and riotous offspring, the viral, there are strong signs of a creeping rebellion in trailer-making. The teams behind trailers for the likes of Cloverfield, The Dark Knight, District 9, Paranormal Activity and Inglourious Basterds have risen to the challenge of the new frontier, ushering in what might reasonably be considered a golden age of invention in the field. The future direction of film marketing is unclear, and that provides fertile ground for risk-taking – not because the studios have learned to stop worrying and take a punt, but because they're navigating unknown territory. It's not quite the wild west out there, but a comparison to the early days of rock'n'roll might stand up.
"The studios have had to learn to relax in terms of controlling film promo," says Ryan Parsons, owner of Traileraddict.com, a site that gathers and posts trailers. "The internet is wild. Things come out before they're supposed to, info is leaked, footage is leaked. The studios are just now learning how to exploit that, rather than try to curtail it. The marketing people I've talked to say that even when they're chasing down the source of a leak now, they know it doesn't really harm them – it all reminds people the film exists."
Trailers are immensely popular online. According to research by the Alliance of Women Film Journalists, movie trailers rank third in popularity among the 10bn videos viewed online every year, after news and user-created video. The growth of social networking sites, and particularly the instant buzz of Twitter, in the last two years have moved the goalposts. That process has been further boosted by the development of movie virals – which count online-only videos and interactive "alternate reality" games among their techniques for sucking punters in. The street-smart trailer-makers are the ones involved in multi-platform campaigns for which the release of the trailer is either the climax or the launchpad.
JJ Abrams' Cloverfield trailer, released in July 2007, was a brilliant example of the latter. Shown in US cinemas before the blockbuster Transformers, this teaser used footage from what looked like a home movie featuring screaming, running crowds and explosions in New York. Flying in the face of the first commandment of film promo (consistently supported by market research) that the more the trailer explains and reveals, the more commercially effective it is, it was devoid of information and untitled – only a release date and the name of JJ Abrams appeared onscreen.
"In the case of Cloverfield the trailer started the viral," says Nick Butler, who runs the site movieviral.com. "People watched the trailer over and over to look for clues, because the whole thing was such a mystery. Some people thought it was about terrorism, or maybe it had something to do with Lost [Abrams's TV series]. The trailer sent people off to check out the associated website, thousands of people did exactly that and the online buzz grew like crazy. Over the next few months, we were sent all over the internet. In the end I saw the film four times, constantly looking for links between it and the trailer."
Cloverfield is a perfect example of a trailer that capitalised on the new, more demanding world in which trailers now operate. They must fight for attention online against hundreds of others, be available for viewing 24/7, and face the fact that while they might spark a rush of excitement, they can also cause a sigh of disappointment. Cloverfield also proved that for those studios willing to take the new challenges head on, the rewards could be plentiful. No surprise then that Sony moved in on the action, steering the team at LA's Create Advertising towards a similar approach for Neill Blomkamp's alien thriller District 9.
"The studio had a big online and billboard campaign planned," says David Stern, owner of Create. "They were working on the notion that maybe it was better to pose questions in the trailer than tell people everything. When we found out about their campaign, we actually ditched our first, more traditional, story-orientated, trailer for one that just implied that something is going on in District 9 but we're not telling you what. We even made two versions – one blurred the alien and didn't subtitle his words, so it really made people wonder what was going on."
The experiment paid off – District 9 took $37m on its opening weekend this August and stayed strong through the summer. Sony approached its early trailers for Roland Emmerich's 2012 in the same way, again backing them up with a wave of viral marketing.
Trailer-maker Mark Rance has been a victim of the studios' natural timidity in the past. His daring ideas for promos for The Prestige, which proposed to use the screen like a theatre stage, complete with red-curtain framing, were received with enthusiasm by director Christopher Nolan and his producer-partner Emma Thomas, but rejected by Touchstone Pictures. A mere year on however, he was involved in a campaign for The Dark Knight that saw the studios, increasingly aware of the possibilities for a film's extra-curricular online life, loosen up a little.
Rance was hired to direct a series of online trailers titled Gotham Tonight. They aired once a week for the six weeks leading up to the film's release and expanded on an ostensibly minor thread within it, prior knowledge of which was rewarded with a narrative pay-off in the movie.
The Dark Knight was accompanied by a wildly varied and imaginative viral which involved numerous websites, interactive games and a treasure hunt, climaxing with the Imax-hosted launch of a six-minute trailer showing the effervescent heist scene from the film (James Cameron went seven minutes better with the Imax-premiered Avatar trailer this August). Rance agrees that the dawn of virals and Twitter have forced the studios to experiment with trailers, but he firmly believes that their inherent conservatism will lead to a more homogenised approach once they get their heads around the territory.
"Clamping down is part of the system," he says. "They'll end up just copying other ideas that have worked. Of course a viral shouldn't be a repeat of another viral, it should be like improvised jazz, taking on its own life. But to call the studios cautious – that's a polite way of putting it."
As David Stern suggests, the most significant impact that Rance's "improv" virals have had on trailers has been to free them from a commitment to plot information. The best online trailers don't go beyond "teaser" territory, needing only to intrigue, or even confuse, to set film fans off on a detective's quest. This has allowed for some genuinely innovative and smart promo work, like the fake news report on Dr Manhattan that formed part of the alternative Watchmen universe, and the Coraline trailer in which Neil Gaiman gravely described the effects of koumpounophobia, the fear of buttons, which set the tone for his script.
Also fantastically curiosity-pricking was the trailer for the German war film Nation's Pride – "by Alois von Eichberg" – which seemed to come from nowhere when it debuted this August. Nation's Pride turned out to be the (Eli Roth-directed) film within the film of Inglourious Basterds and, apart from ramping up the Basterds-related buzz, it showed film fans that Tarantino was truly one of them, an enthusiast who had fun with the parallel online life of the movie.
Cheeringly, the incredible word of mouth around the hugely successful $11,000 budget horror Paranormal Activity – bolstered by what Hugo Grumbar, president of distribution at Icon Films, calls an "experience trailer" showing terrified audiences' reaction – proves that viral marketing is not restricted to top-end films. In fact imagination and original thinking is more crucial to the success of this kind of marketing than big bucks, as the mid-budget District 9 also showed.
Of course there are other, more subtle, ways of exploiting the opportunities that high-speed word of mouth presents and the ever-pioneering Disney Pixar is master of the "double hit". Pixar has always made pester-power-engendering trailers, full of high-speed adventure and snappy one-liners, then rewarded parents with the high quality of its finished films. Recently it has gone further, hitting unsuspecting mums and dads with mournful stories of broken-hearted widowers and a surprisingly faithful, highly literary Dickens adaptation, ensuring a whole new promotional afterlife for Up and A Christmas Carol after their release.
Grumbar admits he attempted a similar trick with Icon's Bridge to Terabithia. "I thought if we slightly missold the trailer as Narnia or something like that, people wouldn't feel cheated when they saw the film because it was satisfying for all kinds of audiences. Did it pay off? Absolutely."
Movie trailers used to be pretty formulaic – just show the best bits – but, in the age of the internet viral, they're now works of art in themselves.
If you're looking for art or auteurship at the cinema, you're likely to be waiting for the main feature, not concentrating on the trailers for what were quaintly known as "coming attractions". As long as they have existed, trailers have been the tool of film marketing departments aiming solely to secure the maximum number of bums on seats. Experimentation with the form has not been a big part of the story. There have been brief flourishes of artistic advancement, such as the move towards fast-edit montages led by Kubrick in the early 1960s, and periodical oddities, like Hitchcock's personally hosted guided tour of the Bates Motel for Psycho, and the mock advertisement for the Ghostbusters' services, which led to the advertised phone number taking 1,000 calls an hour for six weeks in 1984. But the vast majority of studio-financed trailer-makers have played it safe, their audience-tested trailers following the basic three-act rule of set-up, jeopardy and emotional- or action-based blow-out.
Now, however, thanks mainly to that feral little monster, the internet, and one of its most recent and riotous offspring, the viral, there are strong signs of a creeping rebellion in trailer-making. The teams behind trailers for the likes of Cloverfield, The Dark Knight, District 9, Paranormal Activity and Inglourious Basterds have risen to the challenge of the new frontier, ushering in what might reasonably be considered a golden age of invention in the field. The future direction of film marketing is unclear, and that provides fertile ground for risk-taking – not because the studios have learned to stop worrying and take a punt, but because they're navigating unknown territory. It's not quite the wild west out there, but a comparison to the early days of rock'n'roll might stand up.
"The studios have had to learn to relax in terms of controlling film promo," says Ryan Parsons, owner of Traileraddict.com, a site that gathers and posts trailers. "The internet is wild. Things come out before they're supposed to, info is leaked, footage is leaked. The studios are just now learning how to exploit that, rather than try to curtail it. The marketing people I've talked to say that even when they're chasing down the source of a leak now, they know it doesn't really harm them – it all reminds people the film exists."
Trailers are immensely popular online. According to research by the Alliance of Women Film Journalists, movie trailers rank third in popularity among the 10bn videos viewed online every year, after news and user-created video. The growth of social networking sites, and particularly the instant buzz of Twitter, in the last two years have moved the goalposts. That process has been further boosted by the development of movie virals – which count online-only videos and interactive "alternate reality" games among their techniques for sucking punters in. The street-smart trailer-makers are the ones involved in multi-platform campaigns for which the release of the trailer is either the climax or the launchpad.
JJ Abrams' Cloverfield trailer, released in July 2007, was a brilliant example of the latter. Shown in US cinemas before the blockbuster Transformers, this teaser used footage from what looked like a home movie featuring screaming, running crowds and explosions in New York. Flying in the face of the first commandment of film promo (consistently supported by market research) that the more the trailer explains and reveals, the more commercially effective it is, it was devoid of information and untitled – only a release date and the name of JJ Abrams appeared onscreen.
"In the case of Cloverfield the trailer started the viral," says Nick Butler, who runs the site movieviral.com. "People watched the trailer over and over to look for clues, because the whole thing was such a mystery. Some people thought it was about terrorism, or maybe it had something to do with Lost [Abrams's TV series]. The trailer sent people off to check out the associated website, thousands of people did exactly that and the online buzz grew like crazy. Over the next few months, we were sent all over the internet. In the end I saw the film four times, constantly looking for links between it and the trailer."
Cloverfield is a perfect example of a trailer that capitalised on the new, more demanding world in which trailers now operate. They must fight for attention online against hundreds of others, be available for viewing 24/7, and face the fact that while they might spark a rush of excitement, they can also cause a sigh of disappointment. Cloverfield also proved that for those studios willing to take the new challenges head on, the rewards could be plentiful. No surprise then that Sony moved in on the action, steering the team at LA's Create Advertising towards a similar approach for Neill Blomkamp's alien thriller District 9.
"The studio had a big online and billboard campaign planned," says David Stern, owner of Create. "They were working on the notion that maybe it was better to pose questions in the trailer than tell people everything. When we found out about their campaign, we actually ditched our first, more traditional, story-orientated, trailer for one that just implied that something is going on in District 9 but we're not telling you what. We even made two versions – one blurred the alien and didn't subtitle his words, so it really made people wonder what was going on."
The experiment paid off – District 9 took $37m on its opening weekend this August and stayed strong through the summer. Sony approached its early trailers for Roland Emmerich's 2012 in the same way, again backing them up with a wave of viral marketing.
Trailer-maker Mark Rance has been a victim of the studios' natural timidity in the past. His daring ideas for promos for The Prestige, which proposed to use the screen like a theatre stage, complete with red-curtain framing, were received with enthusiasm by director Christopher Nolan and his producer-partner Emma Thomas, but rejected by Touchstone Pictures. A mere year on however, he was involved in a campaign for The Dark Knight that saw the studios, increasingly aware of the possibilities for a film's extra-curricular online life, loosen up a little.
Rance was hired to direct a series of online trailers titled Gotham Tonight. They aired once a week for the six weeks leading up to the film's release and expanded on an ostensibly minor thread within it, prior knowledge of which was rewarded with a narrative pay-off in the movie.
The Dark Knight was accompanied by a wildly varied and imaginative viral which involved numerous websites, interactive games and a treasure hunt, climaxing with the Imax-hosted launch of a six-minute trailer showing the effervescent heist scene from the film (James Cameron went seven minutes better with the Imax-premiered Avatar trailer this August). Rance agrees that the dawn of virals and Twitter have forced the studios to experiment with trailers, but he firmly believes that their inherent conservatism will lead to a more homogenised approach once they get their heads around the territory.
"Clamping down is part of the system," he says. "They'll end up just copying other ideas that have worked. Of course a viral shouldn't be a repeat of another viral, it should be like improvised jazz, taking on its own life. But to call the studios cautious – that's a polite way of putting it."
As David Stern suggests, the most significant impact that Rance's "improv" virals have had on trailers has been to free them from a commitment to plot information. The best online trailers don't go beyond "teaser" territory, needing only to intrigue, or even confuse, to set film fans off on a detective's quest. This has allowed for some genuinely innovative and smart promo work, like the fake news report on Dr Manhattan that formed part of the alternative Watchmen universe, and the Coraline trailer in which Neil Gaiman gravely described the effects of koumpounophobia, the fear of buttons, which set the tone for his script.
Also fantastically curiosity-pricking was the trailer for the German war film Nation's Pride – "by Alois von Eichberg" – which seemed to come from nowhere when it debuted this August. Nation's Pride turned out to be the (Eli Roth-directed) film within the film of Inglourious Basterds and, apart from ramping up the Basterds-related buzz, it showed film fans that Tarantino was truly one of them, an enthusiast who had fun with the parallel online life of the movie.
Cheeringly, the incredible word of mouth around the hugely successful $11,000 budget horror Paranormal Activity – bolstered by what Hugo Grumbar, president of distribution at Icon Films, calls an "experience trailer" showing terrified audiences' reaction – proves that viral marketing is not restricted to top-end films. In fact imagination and original thinking is more crucial to the success of this kind of marketing than big bucks, as the mid-budget District 9 also showed.
Of course there are other, more subtle, ways of exploiting the opportunities that high-speed word of mouth presents and the ever-pioneering Disney Pixar is master of the "double hit". Pixar has always made pester-power-engendering trailers, full of high-speed adventure and snappy one-liners, then rewarded parents with the high quality of its finished films. Recently it has gone further, hitting unsuspecting mums and dads with mournful stories of broken-hearted widowers and a surprisingly faithful, highly literary Dickens adaptation, ensuring a whole new promotional afterlife for Up and A Christmas Carol after their release.
Grumbar admits he attempted a similar trick with Icon's Bridge to Terabithia. "I thought if we slightly missold the trailer as Narnia or something like that, people wouldn't feel cheated when they saw the film because it was satisfying for all kinds of audiences. Did it pay off? Absolutely."
Friday, 25 September 2009
A2 Media - Advanced Production - Trailer Analysis
These are the films you have been asked to watch over the next week for homework. Choose one to analyse in detail, answering the same questions set for the 'Control' trailer. Here are the questions again:
What is a trailer designed to do?
Generate interest in the film;
Inform the audience about the release date?
Show off the stars of the film;
Show the film to its best advantage;
Create excitement/interest;
Tell people what the film is about, e.g. the genre;
Not give too much of the plot away;
Tease the audience by setting up narrative enigmas;
Showcase some of the best bits of the film;
Give details about the production team?
Does your chosen trailer do this?
Watch your chosen trailer several times. Then write one paragraph answering the questions listed below.
Q1. Discuss the use of codes and conventions used in the construction of this film trailer.
Q2. Consider the representations of people and places in this film trailer.
Q3. What does this film trailer tell us about the institutions involved?
Q4. Explore some of the ways in which this film trailer communicates with its target audiences.
Trailer for 'Let the Right One In' (2008)
Trailer for 'La Haine' (1995)
Trailer for 'Leon' (1994)
Trailer for 'Bullet Boy' (2007)
Trailer for 'My Summer of Love (2007)
Trailer for 'Brick' (2005)
American Trailer for 'Dirty Pretty Things' (2002) - hmmm, what gives it away?
Trailer for 'Eastern Promises' (2007)
What is a trailer designed to do?
Generate interest in the film;
Inform the audience about the release date?
Show off the stars of the film;
Show the film to its best advantage;
Create excitement/interest;
Tell people what the film is about, e.g. the genre;
Not give too much of the plot away;
Tease the audience by setting up narrative enigmas;
Showcase some of the best bits of the film;
Give details about the production team?
Does your chosen trailer do this?
Watch your chosen trailer several times. Then write one paragraph answering the questions listed below.
Q1. Discuss the use of codes and conventions used in the construction of this film trailer.
Q2. Consider the representations of people and places in this film trailer.
Q3. What does this film trailer tell us about the institutions involved?
Q4. Explore some of the ways in which this film trailer communicates with its target audiences.
Trailer for 'Let the Right One In' (2008)
Trailer for 'La Haine' (1995)
Trailer for 'Leon' (1994)
Trailer for 'Bullet Boy' (2007)
Trailer for 'My Summer of Love (2007)
Trailer for 'Brick' (2005)
American Trailer for 'Dirty Pretty Things' (2002) - hmmm, what gives it away?
Trailer for 'Eastern Promises' (2007)
Monday, 31 August 2009
A2 MEDIA - Case Study - Trailer for Control (2007) d. Anton Corbijn
What is a trailer designed to do?
Generate interest in the film;
Inform the audience about the release date?
Show off the stars of the film;
Show the film to its best advantage;
Create excitement/interest;
Tell people what the film is about, e.g. the genre;
Not give too much of the plot away;
Tease the audience by setting up narrative enigmas;
Showcase some of the best bits of the film;
Give details about the production team?
Identifying the precise function and objectives of a text is always a useful starting point in an analysis. You can then start to ‘measure’ the trailer against this check list and perhaps start to ask yourself questions about the ways in which the trailer does (or does not) meet these objectives and think about why, and the way in which, the trailer perhaps deliberately challenges some of these assumptions about the suggested objectives of film trailers.
Watch the trailer several times. Then write one paragraph answering the questions listed below.
Q1. Discuss the use of codes and conventions used in the construction of this film trailer.
Q2. Consider the representations of people and places in this film trailer.
Q3. What does this film trailer tell us about the institutions involved?
Q4. Explore some of the ways in which this film trailer communicates with its target audiences.
CONTEXT
Below is the music video to Joy Division's last single 'Atmosphere' released after Ian Curtis had died. It was also directed by Anton Corbjin. Many of the band's videos and artwork used black and white imagery. Watch and look at the trailers, videos and covers below. How might they have influenced the director?
Compare the tone and institutions associated with the production and distribution of the Indiana Jones release in the same year as 'Control'. How do they fare globally and financially in terms of marketing, publicity and budgets?
http://www.momentumpictures.co.uk/flash#main
http://www.paramount.com/
http://lucasfilm.com/
http://www.ilm.com/
There have already been other films about the Manchester music scene of the late 1970s and 1980s. Michael Winterbottom's 2002 film 'Twenty-Four Hour Party People' has a very different tone. How might this and the 'Joy Division' (2007) documentary have helped 'Control' at the box office?
Artwork from various Joy Division record covers
Unknown Pleasures (1979)
Closer (1980)
Love Will Tear Us Apart (1981)
Photos taken of Joy Division in the late 1970s by Anton Corbjin
Original Film Poster
Website for the film
http://momentum.control.substance001.com/
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)