Inspirational Generic Trailers

There are a number of trailers that I find to be inspirational for their use of codes and conventions.Here are two examples:

The Godfather (1972, Paramount, directed by Fracis Ford Cappola)
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DO-nDW43Ik

The Godfather is about an ageing head of a famous crime family, transferring his position to a younger family member. With a series of unfortunate events, conflict occurs between the family, and results in revenge and murder. This trailer is a good example of showing the perspective from the criminal's side. The trailer starts by showing the main characters, fading in and out from black transition, one by one, this immediately indicates to the audience who will be important in the narrative of this movie.This type of transition is quite common in crime genre trailers. The characters in this trailer are dressed typically of what we would expect in a mob/ gangster movie as the protagonists are all dressed in smart black suits, white shirts and black bow ties, their hair is also sleekly gelled back. There are other characters who are dressed in trench coats and are wearing fedora's, this usually indicates that the character is a detective. The trailer also showcases a strong family bond between the characters, showing affectionate moments such as characters hugging, dancing and kissing, this is also a common trait in crime films, that the characters who are on the criminal side of the law are all close to each other, even characters who are not blood-related consider each other to be family. There is orchestral music playing over the top the trailer for its entire duration, the music has a slow tempo and has sounds like something those of the higher class would listen to, I think that this indicates just how rich the people in the trailer are. From the conventions used in this trailer, you can tell that this is aimed at a more mature audience who choose to watch films for the drama rather than the action. 

This movie is known to be a classic in the crime genre, however the trailer 44 years old and is very outdated; the genre has evolved somewhat since, therefore it is unlikely we will replicate anything features in this trailer as it is very slow paced and I don't think it would convince an audience to watch the movie, judging by the modern standards of today. I do like the idea of showing a strong family bond between characters, so I could apply this to the drug addicts in my trailer. 

Suicide Squad Trailer #2 (2016, Warner Bros, directed by David Ayer)
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9TpswDIBS8

Although this movie is more anti-hero/super-villain based, it is still technically a crime genre film. The protagonists for this movie are all criminals who are employed to carry out a black ops mission by a secret government. Unlike most films in the crime genre, one of the protagonists of this movie is a female, and she is portrayed to be just as reckless as the other male characters, which is convention breaking as females are often shown to be damsels in distress or femme fetales, giving a modern approach to the genre. Action is shown to be a major theme in this film, as well as comedy,this indicating that this film is aimed at a teenage audience. The characters aren't dressed like stereotypical villains in a crime movies, but they are still made to look unnatural and antagonistic, for example the Joker has golden teeth and his eyes are darkened out with black makeup. I like how in this trailer they sync the visuals with the audio ('Bohemian Rhapsody'- Queen), by timing moments like gun shots to drum beats or guitar rifts, it almost makes it seem as if you are already witnessing the full action before the movie has even come out. 

I like the idea of having an 'anti-hero' protagonist like they have featured in this trailer, and also in a movie that was released earlier this year, Deadpool, the 'anti-hero' approach seems to be popular at this point in time. There are quite a few conventions in this trailer I will avoid using as the movie is mainly super-villain based and uses the crime genre as a sub genre. I will consider using the music overlaying the video in our trailer as I think that this is a good way to draw an audience in, especially by using a well-known song, and helps to make the editing of the trailer seem more fast paced.

My Chosen Genre

Our chosen genre for this project is 'crime'. Since the start if the project, the other member of my group, Georgina Gilbey, and I have decided we want to defy conventions of the crime genre in order to make the trailer more unique and compelling.  We created a mind-map to brainstorm what initial ideas we had for the trailer, as a result of this, below is a list of codes and conventions we would like to include.

Plot:

We have chosen to go down the route of criminal vs. criminal with our plot, as this is a fairly common convention of the genre as I have found out through research, though it is not as common as cops vs.criminals, therefore it will be more original yet still recognisable. The plan at this stage is that the characters that are on opposing sides will be an independent hacker, who is also a serial killer, and a group of illegal drug consumers. Serial killers and drug dealers appear quite often in crime films due to the illegal nature of their actions, so this will therefore help to show that our trailer is advertising a crime movie. In our trailer we want to make it cryptic as to who the audience should be rooting for, putting no favours onto who is the 'good guys and bad guys', leaving this for the audience to judge for themselves. 

The idea is that the hacker will be a supposed member of the infamous 'Anonymous' hacktivist group, and will be hunting down drug user and addicts in order to achieve their misguided revenge for reasons left unknown. In the hacker's past the 'druggies' have committed an act against him/her, and the hacker feels that these people need to pay for hat they have done. 

Characters:

In this trailer, we plan to defy conventions by not making it clear who is the protagonist as there will be a conflict between two criminals. We decided that there should be an independent character who is a hacker who has a thirst for revenge, which will act as the enigma for the trailer, as it is left ambiguous. There will be both male and female characters playing important roles, this helping to defy the 'damsel in distress' or 'femme fetale' role that women usually uptake in crime genre films, however at this stage we have not yet decided what gender any of the characters will be, but we do know that the 'druggies' will contain members of both males and females. 

Props: 

As our characters will all be criminals, they will need weapons such as knives and potentially guns, which is very typical of the genre. The drug-users will obviously need prop drugs to show their addiction. Other props may include leather gloves, webcam/laptop (for the 'Anonymous' member to record themselves speaking their plans), a smoke machine (for the drug addicts den) and fake blood. 

Locations: 

In terms of settings to film in, we plan to use poor-lit locations to help create a mysterious and dangerous vibe to the criminals featured in the trailer, as I believe that this will only make the characters more intriguing, helping convince the audience to see the film to find out more about their hidden motives. These locations might include alleyways or abandoned buildings where the drug-users will use as a hang out/hide-out base and a studio for the hacker scenes.

Cinematography & Editing: 
In order to make our cinematography more dramatic and appealing, we want to make use of slow motion and arc shots in order to do this. We will also use close ups, straight cuts between shots, and hand-held and tracking shots. In terms of editing we think it would be interesting to add glitches or have pixel-y footage to carry out the hacker theme as this can help make the trailer look more captivating. In order to make the cinematography even more unique and convention-defying, we put into consideration the idea of using cross-lighting where we might have blue light on one side of the shot, and orange on the other as using complimentary colours can make the footage more striking and eye-catching. 

Effects: 
After we have taken the footage, there is the possibility we could overlay the footage with on-screen text to show what the hacker is typing or to show what a character is reading, like what you might see in the Sherlock TV series. By using this we can make our trailer look more professional and modern. We could use a typewriter-like font when doing this, and ideally should use the same font as the title font in order to show consistency.

Researching Genre

The Most Popular Genre?
In my research I have found that the most popular film genre of all time is action and/or adventure, this is supported by IMDb where their top two most popular genres are action and adventure (source: http://www.imdb.com/genre/ ). Movies of this genre tend to make record breaking ticket sales, such as Avatar (worldwide grossing $2,788.0) or Titanic (worldwide grossing $2,186.8), and Star Wars: The Force Awakens (worldwide grossing $2,068.2). An audience would go to watch an action adventure movie because there would be a great amount of action going on such as a chase scene or a battle. I think that the reason people would go to see an action/adventure film is mostly for the reason of escapism. Adventure films such as Star Wars and Avatar allow the audience to see fantasy worlds that are far different from our own, adventure films in general would take the audience on an story that they will likely never experience themselves, and that is why people are attracted to these films.
Source for grossing: http://www.boxofficemojo.com/alltime/world/

The site: http://www.the-numbers.com/market/genres , tells us the market share of 15 different genres of films. Adventure has the biggest total box office of £42,584,413,576 from 676 movies. The genre that is placed 2nd in this list is comedy,  totaling £42,000,406,741 from 2,241 movies. The fact that adventure movies have gained £584,006,836 more than comedy movies despite having 1565 less films shows that adventure is of a much greater popularity as there is a bigger audience for these movies. 

This website: http://bozell.com/most-popular-movie-genres/ shows two charts about what the most popular genres are, the first chart shows what movie genre people like to see most in the theatres, the result was action adventure. The second chart shows what the most popular genres are by race, the majority of all ethinicities preferring action and adventure the most as well. The source that this website used is the Neilson Company, a company that monitors what consumers watch and buy. However this source was made back in 2013 and 2012, so there is a chance that this can be outdated.

My Group

The members of my group are:
Tia Briers (Candidate No. 2015)
Georgina Gilbey (Candidate No. 2044)
Her blog: georginagilbeya2media.blogspot.com