Evaluation-Question 1

Teaser trailers are a way of film companies advertising their films. They have their own set of conventions which are different to full length trailers. The main conventions of the teaser trailer are:

• A length of 30-90 seconds
• Little or no dialogue from the film. This may be because the scenes haven’t been shot yet or to keep mystery about the film and to avoid spoilers
• If no speech is used then music is used instead to avoid awkward boring silences.

We decided to keep to the convention of having no dialogue so that we do not reveal too much about our film.We formed this decision after researching and viewing a trailer for Cherrybomb, as it was very effective and didn’t contain one word of dialogue until the very end. Instead of having silence which we decided might lose the audiences attention we added in music. We wanted to convey two very different moods, so we decided that we should use two different songs that had very different moods. One was a lighthearted mood- The specials- A message to you Rudy and the other was a hard gritty rap song by Trip to show the gangsters.

Our trailer is 59 seconds long as is exactly in between the recommended 30-90 seconds. We chose this because we felt that 30 seconds would be too short and wouldn’t show the audience the moods we were trying to set and that 90 seconds would be too long and we would leave the reader with too much information as we wanted to keep a bit of mystery about the film. We also didn’t want the viewer to get bored, especially if we had no dialogue.

As our film is a spoof of traditional teen drama films we wanted to go against as many conventions as we could. In other trailers, the teens are seen as over-sexualised or very violent, however, our characters are seen as being hapless geeks. We also noticed that posters tended to be dark and gritty showing the male characters with weapons wearing “chavvy” clothing and females being very sexual with hardly any clothes on. We didn’t want this for our poster so we decided to focus mainly on their faces, which are smiling and obviously drunk. The poster is also very bright and the faces are well lit leaving no sinister sub-tones.
Below is a real poster for the movie kidulthood compared to our poster. As you can see they are very different and do not seem like the same genre at all. We chose to make our characters completely different to those featured on the poster. They are all looking aggressively at the reader and are typical youth gang members, where as ours are fully dressed and have calm and naive expressions.

Our webpage however comply with the conventions as the image is the same as that on the poster and it also has main features that most film websites have, such as, a hompage, navigational bar, facebook link and feauture the trailer itself. We chose not to diverge against the type of websites we researched because we found them to be very successful and we felt that the audience would connect with it better when they were able to gain more information, especially through the photo gallery.

In other ways our film doesn’t fit in with the conventions of British teen films as they usually outline the problems of gang members in inner city area. Ours, show the problems ordinary people encounter when they experience extra ordinary events. They are also suburbians who are good, intelligent geeks (rather than criminals). Our setting is also very different to those trailers we researched. We discovered that they were mostly set in dark dingy alleys in cities, where as ours often shows green, leafy areas. We used this to show the stupidity of the characters and that they should be living clean cut lives, rather than running around after stealing a gangsters drug money.

Overall, I feel that we have mainly kept to the conventions set of teaser trailers but that we have altered the tone of teen dramas to combine it with satirical comedy.