Trailer planning / Primary Research / Secondary Research

Hello.

Today we were given the task to make a trailer for a specific genre. We are allowed to work in groups, and so I have decided to work with Tatum and Noelia.

Since we all have a shared interest of the LGBTQ community, we decided to make a film about the past and present gay scene. The prejudices that the people in the past faced and the what has been progressive since then. We are filming in SoHo, which is home to the multiple gay bars. For our research, we have watched a series of LGBTQ media such as I-D's short films on youtube, the film stonewall, the vice documentary "the last lesbian bars" and the documentary "do i sound gay?" by david thorpe. We also watched the LGBTQ movie "17 again" for inspiration as they use a lot of handheld camera shots and that is what style we want to use in our short film trailer.

I decided to watch the trailer for "17 again" and review what conventions they use to make the genre and storyline apparent to the potential audience they are targeting.

the first scene on screen shows two adolescent boys, thomas and damien. damien walks up to thomas slowly and pushes him down whilst a friendly sounding instrumental plays in the background. the music playing is non-diegetic (commentary) and is used to indicate a growing relationship between the two boys to a secondary source (the audience). mise en scene is also used to link the characters with costume. both characters are dressed alike, the one with the brighter (blue) hat stands out more as he is the lead in this film. they are shown first in the trailer to make it apparent to the viewers that they are the protagonists of this story. the next scene shows thomas and his mother in the car, greeting each other in a friendly manner, the editing is manipulated to show her as the next character on screen, as she is also important to the storyline as thomas' mother, but she is not a main character.

the editing style is aggressive with fast cuts to show the progression of the story while keeping the clip trailer-like and not revealing the plot by showing too much dialogue/interaction. the clips get slower and faster depending on the tempo of the bgm. the background music has string instruments that build up like an orchestra according to the intensity of action on screen. for example, in the beginning, the music is relatively calm but as the plotline is unveiled, the music progressively gets richer in sound, adding ambience to the visuals. the music is also synched in time to the cuts to make the trailer flow effectively and the directors name and the title is shown in time to the music to catch the viewers attention.

all of these conventions are typical of any film trailer, despite genre.

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We all decided that we really like the style of I-D's short films as they are really aesthetically pleasing to the eyes and have ambient music playing in the background in order to create a specific mood. The shots are very quick and the video usually has a introductory v.o at the beginning.

An example of this is I-D's video on Brazilian beauty addiction.

i-D uses colour and music to bring their short films to life, and this is what we wanted to do with our trailer.

But a trailer isn't just about what we like as a group. We needed some research to determine what kind of trailer we should make. So we took to surveymonkey.co.uk and asked seventeen very different people their views.

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After our survey, we decided to interview two people around the people in our group's age (16-19).

We asked them questions about a documentary as the two girls in our class decided to make a documentary. Since I was the only person turning the footage I shot into a short film trailer, I decided to gather research with them as it still could help my project since we are in the same area (Soho). We also did two interviews with members of our own group.