So What Makes A Good Film Trailer?

After recent talks with the group, Alex is back with the group and it feels like were heading towards the trailer option as it's something we think we can pull off really well.

So what makes a good film trailer? well that depends largely on the genre of film your planing to produces. After watching several on YouTube its quite clear that certain genres have certain conventions. For example, Films like Horror or Action have A very loud trailer with lots of fast cut aways to make the audience feel like there missing something. Where as something like romance would need to feature a lot of the film with a wide rage of character close ups and scenic shots to give the impression of a feel good movie or that the film has a happy story line etc.

Watch these two contrasting trailers and see for your self....

This is the trailer for the 2008 film , Iron Man. Its a good example of a action film trailer as it conveys all the conventions i mentioned earlier. The trailer helped the film gain even more success that it would of done with out the trailer. It makes you feel like you have to watch the film which is done with its fast short snippets and cut aways.





Love actually was released in 2003 and is a romantic comedy. Although I've never seen the film i do get a good idea what its about and the story line involved from the trailer. Which is a complete contrast to Iron man. I wanted to see that for different reasons such as i wasn't told any part of a story line from the trailer so i was intrigued.

Review Of Skills

As part of the AS section of the A level course, i learned and picked up many skills which will later on help me with the practical production of this years course.

Pre Production

I feel that i could of worked a lot harder during this sections as i only reviewed a few films and techniques. This came round in the long run as i hadn't researched this enough and lost vital marks during this part. Skills i learned would include, learning to identify genre such as film noir,Action,Thriller etc, the way shots where constructed to represent certain groups of people and basic editing to name a few. These skills will benefit me in A2 and i hope to develop them over the year.

Production

For me personally, and i would imagine the rest of my group, production was the main area where we achieved most of our marks for the project. We worked well as a group to produce an A grade video using typical conventions learned during the course. Although we received an A , we didn't follow all the methods set out in real film industry, like proper detailed story boarding, shot planning etc. Although we made up for it with techniques like match on actions and cleaver editing. I would like to improve on making a more professional film this year and improve my grade.

Review

After reviewing my progress from last year i've realised that in order to achieve a decent grade at A2, I will need to put a lot more work and effort into my portfolio. My Pre production and research need to be focused on more so than AS. I'm confident in the respect that i feel i know the skills from last year, the hard part will be putting them into practice.