Main Influence

Prisoners

Prisoners was our main influence when planning our teaser trailer, as it is a film noir and that is the kind of sense we want in our production. There is a teaser and a theatrical trailer for this film and both include a dark element to them. The fast pace movement in the teaser trailer, jumping from shot to shot is what we want to create suspense for the audience. We would also like to link our trailer/film to a thriller genre as a lot of our audience that we had a chat with, liked that kind of film so to appeal to them it would be a good idea. It does not step out of the conventions of film noir as there are several film noirs that mainly focus on the thriller genre. We chose this film as our main influence as we are focusing more on the way it is shot and the lighting used, opposed to the storyline of what happens in the film.

Showing you screen caps of the trailer I will talk about what we took from the trailer to help with our trailer planning and production.

 

The dark black screen with the lit white text has a good contrast and connects with the film noir. This means that we can incorporate this in our trailer as the colours will be a focus in ours trailer also and as they connect which the genre type film that we are producing it fits in well.

The first quote that pops up is, the top screen cap "From the moment a child goes missing" which draws the audience in and triggers people's attention to keep watching which something that we need is.

The timer escalating is a way of holding the audience until the trailer goes out with a bang. This way it keeps the audience watching until the very end which is exactly what we want and is exactly why we are incorporating it into our trailer.

The awards nominations shown mean that it looks well produced at the end of the day, the actors in the film are that good that they have been nominated for their skills shown in past and present films. As our film is not a blockbuster we didn't want to use something like this however we have begun to realise there is a running theme in independent films where a festival award is shown or a small independent award is given out to an actor or a winning genre. This will look good on a trailer as it will show that the film is worthy of an award and some aspects of the film must be good to have been presented with a certain award of whatever we chose to put in at the end of the editing.

 

 



Both Sophie and I have discussed that the use of lighting scenery in this trailer is really good. As they have made it so that the actors using the torches are the lighting and presents the scenery, opposed to high end lighting that is for big production companies, which is also what we could do to. We do not have access to big lighting equipment, so using torches could be a good idea but still effective. As for the smoke and mist etc. that could be done on a dark night and smoke machine which is present as a prop if need be.