Research into teaser trailers.

To help us come up with our teaser trailer we decided to research them but more specifically horror trailers. Here are a few that I looked at:

Scream 4
The Strangers
Mirrors
Paranormal Activity
The Haunting In Connecticut
The Unborn
Halloween 2

Scream 4

This particular trailer is very similar to how we want to make our own trailer, the trailer itself isn't as fast paced as the others, and is showing more of a story but then still cuts up the scenes from the film to only show snippets of what is going to happen. This makes it look like a trailer, rather than the beginning of a film which is what we have to be careful not to do when making our own.

From the horror ones I can see that they are very quick paced with flashing images of short clips, usually screaming or the main scary parts. However before this they build up tension by usually displaying some sort of text, sometimes a question. In my group we decided that we like that text appearing and will be doing the same. They also quickly change the pace and atmosphere to engage the audience and to give the shock factor. The non horror trailers have a similar template. They again choose the main/exciting parts of the film and flash them up, however they don't seem to use the text technique. The horror ones always seem to have some sort of non-diagetic sound to create tension and atmosphere, we will again be using this technique.

This research has definitely helped us to decide what our content our teaser trailer should have.

Starting point..

For our teaser trailer we have ultimately decided to make our genre horror/thriller. We decided this because a genre such as this is easy to portray for such amateur work, to create a tense and sinister atmosphere is relatively easy as fear is a feeling that is quite simple to bring out in people. The equation for a horror trailer, is fast snappy shots, in a domestic area, not much dialogue and as a general rule of thumb is set at night time, and because we have only home video cameras, the technique of hand held camera, can be justified with films such as The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield. But this is just the beginning to our planning for a trailer, as we have seen plenty of horror films ourselves and horror trailers we know what generally makes us scared when we see these texts, and so we already have the basic knowledge of what is going to make this project good; we still need to do more research. We need to look more closely at teaser trailers, and then specifically at horror trailers, but also horror films.

Pitch

Rosie has a secret..something that no one in her present life knows about until now. Betsy has been a phycatrist for over the past 20 years and for all her time served to estranged patients from the St Mary's hospital she has never come across a story like Rosie's.
The Cult is the previous home of Rosie where she lived with her mother and two brothers.. at the age of 16 she'd finally had had enough of the abuse and torture her elders oposed on her and managed to escape to a new life and new world outside the religious bounds this cult has given her. 10 years later she comes across her past that never fails to haunt her, and has to fight to save herself and everything she has built around her.

The content of our A2

When in class we were given 5 objectives and had to choose one to complete. We picked the one to make a teaser trailer. This is the main task to complete. There were another three as well well which we had to complete two of, the three were to do a design of the homepage of the film, the second was to design a poster for the film, the third is to design a magazine front cover advertising our film. We decided to make a film poster and magazine cover.