Film Trailer Portfolio Essay -- Papers

Film Trailer Portfolio When the task of creating a film trailer was first put to us, I had several ideas for the movie's context. The first was of a movie in the action genre that dealt with revenge, whilst the other two were in the horror genre. The horror genre appealed to me more, as a low budget film can still have the desired effect by use of different filming techniques, and I wanted to depend more on a psychological aspect. My first idea was to do a film about a poltergeist. I had watched several films such as "Poltergeist", but wanted to create a film that relied less on visual effects, something that leant towards the style of Albert Hitchcock, who is still seen today as the "Master of Suspense". This Poltergeist idea did intrigue me, but I could not think of a plot thick enough, or original enough to capture an audience. The remaining idea was more original, and would create the correct feel of the horror genre. This idea leant more towards several horror films from the 1970s, when a crop of films also used religious undertones to great effect. My idea was for an ancient relic to be uncovered that posed a threat to religion, an idea that didn't require special effects or large production values. I took this idea and tried to further it by thickening out the plot for the trailer. To do this, I researched other films in the same genre. I looked directly at three films from the last three decades, "The Exorcist", "The Name of the Rose" and "The Sixth Sense". I was first attracted to these films by the techniques that had been used to produce the desired effect on the audience. The Exorcist (William Friedkin 1973) ... ... on a Panasonic Digital Camera, and was edited using Pinnacle Studio software on a PC. All of the footage was shot without the use of a tripod after several experiments to see what presented the storyline the most effectively. Most notably at the beginning of the trailer, a short zoom shot towards a radio speaker was attempted with a tripod, but the elegant and fixed camera movement lacked the character and ambience that was available when recorded handheld, especially with the emotional sound bite that accompanied the shot. I decided to use two different tints Editing during "I dare not say" I wanted the speed of the trailer to change when I was editing, from calm and mellow camera movement with slow transitions, to brisk and abrupt movement with quick transitions. This was my idea of representing chaos.