Analysis of low budget film trailers

The Blair Witch Project.



This is one of the most successful low budget films. A list of production budget figures have circulated over the years, appearing as low as $20,000. In an interview, Sánchez revealed the truth about the budget. When principal photography first wrapped, approximately $20,000 to $25,000 had been spent. When the directing pair took the film to Sundance, they had to make a print and render a sound mix for the picture, which moved the budget close to $100,000. Before Artisan Entertainment bought the licensing rights they spent an additional "half-million dollars" crafting a new sound mix and reshoots for scenes they wanted changed. Sánchez concludes that the final budget was somewhere between $500,000 and $750,000. The film grossed over $248,639,099 worldwide. This is probably the most successful independent and low budget film of all time. This indicates that the film trailer must have been good to have had such an influence on the target audience.-Analysis of The Blair Witch Project film trailer.

The film trailer defies some of the typical conventions of film trailers. The first example of this would be the length. Typically film trailers last approximately 3 minutes, whereas, this trailer only last forty seconds. This means that barely any of the film footage is shown in order to give the audience a taster of what the film is about, the narrative, the characters, furthermore these scenes also can help to influence the audience to go and see the film, however this trailer has taken a different approach and only shown about two short, under five second clips from the film. Therefore the influential content must come from the music, taglines, reviews and the narrators voice over.The trailer shows three reviews from;- 'Genuinely Frightening' - Newsday- 'One of the creepiest films since the Exorcist' - Entertainment Weekly- 'Scary as Hell' - Rolling StoneThese big name, recognisable companies such as Entertainment Weekly and Rolling Stone influence the target audience of the film by their reviews, such as One of the creepiest films since the Exorcist'. The Exorcist is a well known, world wide film which has also been voted the scariest film of all time by Entertainment Weekly. Therefore comparing this film to the film which they believe to be the best horror film of all time influences the audience that it must be good and encourages them to go and see the film.The Exorcist is a 1973 American horror film, dealing with the demonic possession of a young girl, and her mother’s desperate attempts to win back her daughter through an exorcism conducted by two priests. Both the film and novel took inspiration from a documented exorcism in 1949, performed on a fourteen-year-old boy. The film is one of a cycle of 'demonic child' movies produced in the late 1960s and early 1970s, including Rosemary's Baby and The Omen. The film became one of the most profitable horror films of all time, grossing $402,500,000 worldwide. The film earned ten Academy Award nominations—winning two, one for Best Sound and Best Adapted Screenplay. The Exorcist was commercially released in the United States by Warner Bros. on December 26, 1973, and re-released on March 17, 2000, with a restored version released on September 22, 2000. It was named the scariest movie of all time by Entertainment Weekly and Movies.com and by viewers of AMC in 2006.The main colours of the trailer are black, dark purple, dark blue and grey. These are all dark and dreary colours which connote with death and are the typical colours used in horror films as they create mystery and horror. Most of the four second clips shown are all extremely dark only showing the occasional hand this also creates realism as it is set in a forest at night and so there wouldn’t be any light. This realism could be one of the factors why this film has sold so well as people become immersed in it as it looks like real life and is not packed with special effects and well known stars like Will Smith which highlight the fact that the audience are only watching a film. Also the fact that this film is based on real life story can also encourage people into going to see it as people can become excited and want to know what really happened and what these people experienced.The music over the trailer is also quite slow and creepy, with a woman’s piercing scream over the top.

Animatic of My film trailer

The use of the animatic of my film trailer was to enable me to see how my storyboard sequence looks on the screen and to see if the sequences flows together, it enabled me to decide if some shots needed to be changed in the sequence order to create a different imagery and to enable me to control the speed and structure of how i wanted my film trailer to look. By using the Animatic it allowed me to use the storyboard to plan the timeline of my film and structure how i would like it to look when i began filming, it also aided me in the editing process setting out the structure of my film and the lengths of some shots whilst also deciding what type of transition would be best to show the changes in scenes.

The animatic was also useful in the overall shooting of my film trailer as it showed me what type of camera shots and angles which i was going to need to capture whilst also bringing to my attention some shot types that possibly didnt work as well and needed altering. It also highlighted the important fact to me that when i was watching the sequence playing, some of the shots didnt fit in with the general feel of how i wanted it to appear and therefore this enabled me to cut certain scenes out and revise my ideas.

Trailer

Horror films are designed to frighten and to invoke our hidden worst fears, often in a terrifying, shocking finale, while captivating and entertaining us at the same time in a cathartic experience. Horror films feature a wide range of styles, from the earliest silent Nosferatu classic, to today's CGI monsters and deranged humans. They are often combined with science fiction when the menace or monster is related to a corruption of technology, or when Earth is threatened by aliens. The fantasy and supernatural film genres are not usually synonymous with the horror genre. There are many sub-genres of horror: slasher, teen terror, serial killers, satanic, Dracula, Frankenstein, etc. See this site's Scariest Film Moments and Scenes collection - illustrated.

The horror film genre is the most popular film genre of my target audiecne which is teenagers.
Horror films are movies that strive to elicit the emotions of fear, horror and terror from viewers. Their plots frequently involve themes of death, the supernatural or mental illness. Many horror movies also include a central villain.
Early horror movies are largely based on classic literature of the gothic/horror genre, such as Dracula, Frankenstein, The Phantom of the Opera and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
More recent horror films, in contrast, often draw inspiration from the insecurities of life after World War II, giving rise to the three distinct, but related, sub-genres: the horror-of-personality Psycho film, the horror-of-armageddon Invasion of the Body Snatchers film, and the horror-of-the-demonic The Exorcist film.
The last sub-genre may be seen as a modernized transition from the earliest horror films, expanding on their emphasis on supernatural agents that bring horror to the world.[1]
Horror films have been dismissed as violent, low budget B movies and exploitation films. Nonetheless, all the major studios and many respected directors, including Alfred Hitchcock, Roman Polanski, Stanley Kubrick, John Carpenter, William Friedkin, Sam Raimi, Richard Donner, and Francis Ford Coppola have made forays into the genre. Serious critics have analyzed horror films through the prisms of genre theory and the auteur theory. Some horror films incorporate elements of other genres such as science fiction, fantasy, mockumentary, black comedy, and thrillers.


In the first half of the 1990s, the genre continued many of the themes from the 1980s. Sequels from the Child's Play and Leprechaun series enjoyed some commercial success. The slasher films A Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th, and Halloween all saw sequels in the 1990s, most of which met with varied amounts of success at the box office, but all were panned by fans and critics, with the exception of Wes Craven's New Nightmare.
New Nightmare, with In the Mouth of Madness, The Dark Half, and Candyman, were part of a mini-movement of self-reflexive or metafictional horror films. Each film touched upon the relationship between fictional horror and real-world horror. Candyman, for example, examined the link between an invented urban legend and the realistic horror of the racism that produced its villain. In the Mouth of Madness took a more literal approach, as its protagonist actually hopped from the real world into a novel created by the madman he was hired to track down. This reflective style became more overt and ironic with the arrival of Scream.
In 1994's Interview with the Vampire, the "Theatre de Vampires" (and the film itself, to some degree) invoked the Grand Guignol style, perhaps to further remove the undead performers from humanity, morality and class. The horror movie soon continued its search for new and effective frights. In 1985's novel The Vampire Lestat by author Anne Rice (who penned Interview...'s screenplay and the 1976 novel of the same name) suggests that its antihero Lestat inspired and nurtured the Grand Guignol style and theatre.
Two main problems pushed horror backward during this period: firstly, the horror genre wore itself out with the proliferation of nonstop slasher and gore films in the eighties. Secondly, the adolescent audience which feasted on the blood and morbidity of the previous decade grew up, and the replacement audience for films of an imaginative nature were being captured instead by the explosion of science-fiction and fantasy, courtesy of the special effects possibilities with computer-generated imagery.[16]
To re-connect with its audience, horror became more self-mockingly ironic and outright parodic, especially in the latter half of the 1990s. Peter Jackson's Braindead (1992) (known as Dead Alive in the USA) took the splatter film to ridiculous excesses for comic effect. Wes Craven's Scream (written by Kevin Williamson) movies, starting in 1996, featured teenagers who were fully aware of, and often made reference to, the history of horror movies, and mixed ironic humour with the shocks. Along with I Know What You Did Last Summer (written by Kevin Williamson as well) and Urban Legend, they re-ignited the dormant slasher film genre.
Among the popular English-language horror films of the late 1990s, only 1999's surprise independent hit The Blair Witch Project attempted straight-ahead scares. But even then, the horror was accomplished in the context of a mockumentary, or mock-documentary. Japanese horror films, such as Hideo Nakata's Ringu in 1998, also found success internationally with a similar formula.
The start of the 2000s saw a quiet period for the genre.[citation needed] The re-release of a restored version of The Exorcist in September 2000 was successful despite the film having been available on home video for years. Franchise films such as Freddy vs. Jason also made a stand in theaters. Final Destination (2000) marked a successful revival of clever, teen-centered horror and spawned three sequels.
Some notable trends have marked horror films in the 2000s. A French horror film Brotherhood of the Wolf became the second-highest-grossing French-language film in the United States in the last two decades. The Others (2001) was a successful horror film of that year. That film was the first horror in the decade to rely on psychology to scare audiences, rather than gore. A minimalist approach which was equal parts Val Lewton's theory of "less is more" (usually employing low-budget techniques seen on 1999's The Blair Witch Project) has been evident,[citation needed] particularly in the emergence of Asian horror movies which have been remade into successful Americanized versions, such as The Ring (2002), and The Grudge (2004). In March 2008, China banned the movies from its Market[17].
There has been a major return to the zombie genre in horror movies made after 2000.[18][citation needed] The Resident Evil video game franchise was adapted into a film released in March 2002. Three sequels have followed. The British film 28 Days Later (2002) featured an update on the genre with The Return of the Living Dead (1985) style of aggressive zombie. The film later spawned a sequel: 28 Weeks Later. An updated remake of Dawn of the Dead (2004) soon appeared as well as the zombie comedy Shaun of the Dead (2004). This resurgence lead George A. Romero to return to his Living Dead series with Land of the Dead (2005), Diary of the Dead (2007) and Survival of the Dead 2009.
A larger trend is a return to the extreme, graphic violence that characterized much of the type of low-budget, exploitation horror from the Seventies and the post-Vietnam years.[citation needed] Films like Audition (1999), Wrong Turn (2003), and the Australian film Wolf Creek (2005), took their cues from The Last House on the Left (1972),[citation needed] The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974),[citation needed] and The Hills Have Eyes (1977).[citation needed] An extension of this trend was the emergence of a type of horror with emphasis on depictions of torture, suffering and violent deaths, (variously referred to as "horror porn", "torture porn", Splatterporn, and even "gore-nography") with films such as FeardotCom, and Captivity, and more recently Saw and Hostel and their respective sequels in particular being frequently singled out as examples of emergence of this sub-genre[19].
Remakes of late 1970s horror movies became routine in the 2000s. In addition to 2004's remake of Dawn of the Dead and 2003's remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, in 2007, Rob Zombie wrote and directed a remake of John Carpenter's Halloween[20]. The film focused more on Michael's backstory than the original did, devoting the first half of the film to Michael's childhood. It was critically panned by most,[21][22] but was a success in its theatrical run. This success lead to the remakes, or "reimaginings" of other popular horror franchises with films such as Friday the 13th,[23] A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010),[24] Hellraiser,[25] and Children of the Corn.[26] Other remakes include The Hills Have Eyes (2006), The Last House on the Left (2009), and The Wolfman (2010)[27].

LIIAR of My Film Trailer

Language: I have chosen to add a voice over to the film to tell the audience a brief insight into the story, i have also added caption cards toagain provide more insight into the films anrrative structure that it is following. Language of the film is conveyed through some of the dialogue between the two characters like when he asks why are you doing this and the assassin replies 'if you knew you'd want me to kill you', this tells the audience there is something big at work here that people are prepared to kill, to murder over. However most of the language of my film is conveyed through the footage i have filmed showing the characters chasing each other and fighting which highlights the confrontation between the hero and the protagonist whilst also shots showing my hero looking at the documents tells the reader that they are private official documents, due to the body language he conveys the audience can work out that the details contained in these papers are shocking and disturbing.


Institution: The institution behind the production of my films are Warner Bros, Lionsgate and Miramax films.

Ideology: The ideology behind my film trailer is that i wanted to create a film which included the conventions from more than one genre. I wanted to take the horror, thriller, action, drama and adventure genres and try and incoporate all of these elements into my film trailer. I also wanted to create a tense action film, however i wanted it to be though provoking and ask the audience how far they would go and what they would risk to do what they believed to be the right thing to do.


Audience:The audience for my film would be typically fans of the action / thriller genres, however i feel it would be aimed towards a younger audience. As after conducting research into the typical age range of cinema goers i discovered that these tended to be dominated by the younger age groups therefore it is vital that i direct my film towards them as they are a bigger audience and therefore more people will go and see my film as a result of this decision.


Representation: This film represents some of the issues which are seen in the world today such as the idea of nuclear warfare and wars between countries over weapons they have produced. However i also wanted to represent the little guy. How one ordinary man who goes to work comes home, sleeps and then goes back to work can help to change the world and make a difference.

Storyboard of my film trailer

Below is the storyboard for my film which i have created which helped me during the filming process of my film trailer in order to decide what shot types and camera angles i needed to use.

Location Shots

Examples of storyboards

Script of my film Trailer

Synopsis of My Film Trailer

Synopsis for Choosen Idea

A manufactured disease which could destroy millions has been created. Nobody knew about it’s existence, that is, until now. CRPL JACK JOHNSON from the US army goes against everything he has ever known and trusted and takes a walk on the wild side of life when he uncovers the production of the virus.

Take $65,000,000 or leave the army and the only life you have ever known for good. Adapting to his new life being a Civvie Johnson is determined to prove to the world of his findings, however hot on his trail is a government assassin. Sean Black is a patriotic man. Living for the past eleven years on the mean streets of New Orleans’s he is no stranger to violence, fighting to stay alive. Black now has a purpose, a beautiful home, with running water, electricity and a roof over his head. To keep it, he must turn his talents on Johnson.

Johnson races across America constantly being pursued by Black who misses a lot of narrow attempts at finishing Johnson off for good, however Johnsons superb military skills is helping to keep him alive. Until he see’s his face plastered across the city. ‘Wanted. Believed to be Armed and Extremely Dangerous’. With his mug shot staring at him wherever he goes, being watched by his own eyes it is not long before the police are hunting him down along with the F.B.I and Black.

With the odd’s stacked heavily against him, Johnson takes the only things he has left, the files, to a man who was his fathers friend. Still grieving over the death of his father who was shot by the same government he swore to fight for, Johnson meets with Attorney General Cole Hennessy. However it isn’t Hennessy who shows up. Johnson is taken hostage and tied up in an unknown location and pleads his case with Black who pulls a gun on him and sets up a video camera with a direct link to the governments offices. Black is convinced by Johnsons argument that the two are in fact brothers who where separated at birth after their mother and father split. Together they band together to rescue Hennessy.

Jack Johnson fulfils his mission to save the life of Hennessy who in turn releases the file, leading to the arrest of certain corrupt and dangerous men in the government. Johnson goes to lay flowers at his fathers grave before he moves to California.


Old Synopsis for Previous Idea

Over ten years ago there was a man who stalked the nights. A deranged killer. After brutally killing over 100 students he was finally captured. He died in jail in the year 2009, but now he’s back. As a group of students gather together over Christmas for a new years eve party, the fun begins. As night falls, the party continues. However there is somebody watching them. Suddenly the back door is found open in the house. Then an upstairs window. A party goer shuts the window before going to the loo. However the shower curtain is swaying. I am going to show her peeling it back when she suddenly screams. The rest of the partying students fail to hear her pleas for help. As the party continues into the early hours of the morning, more of the partiers meet an untimely end. Suddenly it is a desperate fight for survival as the doors are locked tightly shut, The windows nailed down and no way of escape. In the end two students manage to escape the house and flee into the night. The police detectives arrive the next day and the house is completely back to normal with no signs of any of the events which happened last night.

- Romance

Love Actually

Pride and Prejudice

- Comedy

Shaun of the Dead.

Comedy trailers generally are fast paced before stopping suddenly for the audience to hear the joke or to witness a funny scene, before the action tends to speed up again. Following conventions, the usually have a jovial and upbeat soundtrack playing over them. The storyline is usually serious with the characters behaving in a comedian way.

In the Shaun of the Dead trailer, some of these conventions are used. The trailer starts with the effect of television interference 'Please pay attention, this message is for your own safety.'



The Hangover

Hot Fuzz

Spoofs - Scary Movie 3

After researching into comedy film trailer i discovered some of the general conventions which are incorporated in most comedy films, for example i discovered that in most comedy trailers, their is a jovial and upbeat music track in the style of 'Benny Hill', which creates a happy and sound track which has the general effect of putting the audience in a happy and good mood which sets them up for enjoying the film and the humour. I also discovered that most film trailers tend to use slapstick moments such as men walking into lamp posts etc and also tends to leave a gap between the verbal jokes to give the audience time to take in the joke, laugh before they move onto the next one.

Scary Movie 3's film trailer begins with the intertextual reference of the horror film 'the ring', by starting with the text 'There is a videotape', the scene then switches to show a womans legs walking towards the camera, this is then interrupted with interference 'the snowing effect', from the tape which suggests to the audience that what they are being shown now is footage from the videotape, whilst also possibly is just another reference to the tape to keep reinforcing the narrative of the story to the audience. The audience are then shown another piece of text saying 'If you watch it', straight away this indicates to the audience that this is inevitable as people are obviously going to watch a videotape if they have gone out and got it. Highlighting to the audience that this element to the film is going to happen, throughout these sequences more interference is shown again referencing the videotape and leaving the audiences wondering whether they are watching the videotape or if the film are just again making references to the tape which the narrator doing the voice over is referring to.

The scene then cuts to a mid-shot of a young woman putting the tape into her television recorder. The scene moves slowly with eery music playing over the top as she slowly puts the tape into the recorder, the effect of the blue tint to the scene also creates a cold image and gives the audience the impression that they are possibly watching the events on a hidden camera, almost like a fly on the wall, watching the character secretly to see what is going to happen. During these scenes and relying on the audiences knowledge on the film 'The Ring', a tense and spooky atmosphere is created which builds anticipation in the audience as they believe something scary and sudden is about to happen which is conventional of the horror genre, therefore the audience become excited and tense waiting for the climax of the scene. 'Seven Days later will be one week from today.' This text is then shown after a quick sequence of shots showing a woman screaming and a girl emerging from a well, these are shots that are intended to be spooky, however the trailer is taking the previous media construct of 'The Ring' and is parodying the narrative structure in Scary Movie 3, by doing this they are relying on the audiences knowledge of the horror conventional elements and also the knowledge of the film 'The Ring' which builds up their expectation of something scary and dramatic being about to happen when suddely the audience are shown the woman diving off the high cliff and landing on a branch at the very top of the cliff, this slapstick comedy immediately turns the audiences expectations of the previous conventional elements of the suspected horror genre and provides them with the knowledge that this film is going to be satirical and make a joke of a serious film, the audience are then providing with the knowledge that the film genre is a spoof.

The film trailer also plays on the stereotypes of 'dum blondes' this is highlighted in the scene when the two women are discussing the videotape which has been hyped up throughout the beginning sequences of the trailer and one of the women instantly believes that the videotape is a pornography about people having sex in lots of different places and then the other woman states that it is a film that as soon as it is over your phone rings. The trailer then switches back to the conventional elements of a horror film trailer showing a CU of the ringing phone and the shot which shows the depth of field as the female character slowly walks over to the phone, the voice tells her she is going to die within seven days however the dumblonde is shown as mishearing her and believes the speaker is talking about somebody being gay again highlighting the humour is coming from some verbal jokes targeting social stereotypes such as the 'dum blonde' whilst also some of the humour is also coming from the slapstick area of comedy which has been shown in the way in which the woman dives off the cliff and hits the branch.

The film then places text in the trailer in connection with the voice over saying 'Three times the Terror.' This is ironic and again satirical as there is no terror in the film, this again highlights how the trailer is playing with the typical comventions which are associated with the horror film genre and are parodying them in this spoof film. The film then uses juxtaposition in the way in which it shows the horror film sequences and then immediately follows this with the slapstick humour of the man sitting up in bed and banging his head on the light everytime the woman screams again telling the audience that this film isnt a horror film although it is interpreting the conventions of a horror film in their narrative structure. The film also adds addition humour by taking realistic horrifying events such as crop circles which is an intertextual reference with the horror film signs, and taking the seriousness out of it by making a joke out of the scene, this is seen clearly in this case in the way that the crop circles have been chaped to read 'Attack Here', with an arrow pointing at a house in the countryside, this turns the dramatic situation humourous and again hypes up and tenses the audience by using the horror conventions to give them something completely unexpected which creates the humour of the film by playing on the audiences expectations.

The film again makes humourous references with the blonde stereotype by showing the woman talking about how she can sense when danger is nearby and then ends up walking into a microphone and knocking herself out, this slapstick event creates humour yet again and adds more humour to the stereotypical view which is being displayed on 'dum blonde women'. The trailer also uses the stereotypes of disabled people and mutes to be a fuel for the humour which is created in the film. For example the scene in which the president of the US played by Leslie Nelson believes that in the conference there are aliens and these are the mute who speaks with a machine and the disabled man with a head brace on as he deems them to be weird and so must be an alien, this creates humour as the characters ignorance and lack of knowledge as he strikes disabled men as he deems them to be aliens. The trailer also plays on the media images of Simon Cowell and Michael Jackson and interprets the media representations, such as Simon Cowell as being the harsh media critic who gets shot by gangsters and Michael Jacksons media image of being involved in child sex abuse scandals which has been interpreted in the film in the way in which he says he wouldnt have touched the male characters young daughter as she was a girl.' This creates humour as people have knowledge of these reality stars and their personalitites and the humour is caused because of this and the way in which the film has represented them.

The trailer then follows the typical conventions in the way that it shows the films main title, release date and who has starred in the film for the audience to view.



Scary Movie 3