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.