Dead Rising: Watchtower
The Dead Rising movie trailer is tailored to interest its target audience in a variety of different ways. It incorporates action, drama and comedy to suit all of the things its target audience would want in a movie. The audience get an insight in to the basis of the storyline and get a taste of the hectic action and dismay that arises in the situation of the movie. The fast paced cuts in the editing of the trailer would convey that the movie is full of action and commotion thus enticing the audience to want to see how the zombie outbreak situation will handled. We are first introduced to the movie trailer with an equilibrium in which creates a settled atmosphere and conveys a sense of wellbeing in the setting on the film. Suddenly this is turned upside down when this changes to a disequilibrium in which action and suspense is introduced to the movie trailer when the first zombie is seen thus creating a strong sense of unsettledness and unpredictability. The music used in the trailer also follows this convention when it picks up and intensifies thus adding to the strong sense of eeriness, helping to set the mood that the disequilibrium intends to set. This technique is a typical convention used in trailers of the horror genre. Straight away as the trailer starts I can see that it follows one of the main key conventions when we are introduced to the two main characters of the movie (a male and a female). Immediately we see the relationship between them and see that the male character is more of a risk taker whereas the female is much more risk-averse. This will interest the audience as they will feel compelled to know if the two of them will stick to the male’s attitude of taking risks and getting involved in the action and thus making the movie a lot more interesting and exciting. The trailer uses a lot of diegetic synchronous sound so the audience feel more connected to what is happening in the film and will be more influenced to feel the emotions and atmosphere of the characters and the scene. The mixture of dialogue between the characters and the use of music helps convey the complicatedness of the whole zombie outbreak situation and adds to the audience’s curiosity of finding out what happens in the end.
Unfriended
This movie trailer displayed various common conventions of a horror trailer. It starts off with an equilibrium to introduce our main characters, relationships and setting. A sudden disequilibrium shortly interrupts as the central enigma of the film. This part of the trailer also brings with it a sense of tension and suspense in order to lure the audience in, wanting to see where the tension is building to and how a dead girl could be messaging over social networks. The narrative shown in the trailer with the whole 'showing a past event and then bringing the story to the present day' is a very key convention shown in horror movies as a whole, and shows demonstration of Bordwell and Thompson's cause and effect theory. Extreme close ups, scared facial expressions, young adults and a red/black colours scheme for text screens and titles are more key conventions shown in this horror trailer. Some ways in which this trailer shows originality and, perhaps, 'thinks out of the box', is with the use of the whole 'social media' scene, perfectly fitting in with the recent trending of social media networks such as Facebook. A briefly shown death scene is shown towards the end too, with one of the characters putting his hand/head in a blender. Having death scenes for short durations of times in a horror trailer can help by teasing an audience with what the film can offer at its most climactic point, while not revealing too much, meaning that they have to watch the film to get the full impact. I feel as though this is also a convention of horror trailers.
Chernobyl Diaries
Chernobyl Diaries, as with the previous two trailers, opens its own trailer with an equilibrium to introduce the characters, implement relationships and set the scene. This equilibrium is, obviously, soon smashed to pieces by a disequilibrium. This disequilibrium comes equipped with the standard conventional suspenseful music, close ups, a mood of fear, an increase in pace and even multiple moments when the pace slows right down and the music stops to create a 'heart-stopping' moment just before a jump scare (this creates a contrast in dynamics, making the jump scare a lot more of a sudden change). We are shown people being dragged off to, what we assume to be, their deaths in this trailer. This links in with the whole 'teasing death scenes to the audience' idea I mentioned in the Unfriended trailer analysis. The title and text screens of the trailer display the colours red and black in them, which is starting to seem like it could perhaps be regarded to as a convention. We are shown context and history to the storyline what with the actual event, the chernobyl reactor disaster. This is another convention of a horror trailer, as it is the showing of a past event that, in turn, causes the events of this music (Bordwell and Thompson).
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