Evaluation Question 1

A teaser trailer is a short trailer used to advertise an upcoming film, television program or video game. These trailers are released long in advance of the final product, which is why they "tease" the audience. Teaser trailers are used in advertising, for example a teaser-ad. Film teasers, unlike theatrical trailers, are usually very short in length (between 30-60 seconds) and contain very little actual footage from the film. This is sometimes due to the fact that it is in production and some shots have not been filmed, some shots seen in the teaser trailer may not make it into the final version, for example in the Iron Man 2 teaser we see Pepper kissing Stark's helmet and then throwing it off the plane, then he jumps after it yelling "you complete me!" This shot was never used in the final version of the film. Sometimes, it is merely a truncated version of the theatrical trailer.

The purpose of a teaser trailer is to tell the audience about a film's content and show only a little of the narrative. It is designed to simply let them know that the film is coming up in the near future and to generate hype around the upcoming release. As I've mentioned before, teaser trailers are often made while the film is still in production or in the process of editing and may feature scenes or alternative versions that are not in the finished film. Only Pixar films have scenes made for use in the trailer only. Teaser trailers today are focused more on internet downloading due to recent advances in technology including Web 2.0 and conversion of analogue to the digital age.

Sound plays a really important role in a trailer to hold the audience's attention and to control the pace and tension. We recorded all our own sound effects such as the oil lighter and the ambient sounds. We could not find any appropriate copyright-free music so we decided to compose our own using Garageband and took inspiration from music that we thought would fit. Obviously we couldn't use top of the field sound technology that today's big trailer companies use and the mix of our music with the voice-over made the voice-over difficult to hear in places but we were happy with what we could produce using Garageband. To enhance the sound of the voice-over and make it seem more menacing we slowed the speed a bit in Final Cut Pro, to great effect.

Comparing our teaser to a professional one, there are some notable differences. We have no big name actors nor any on-screen text to tell the audience of the actors as they are not hte USP. Instead we use the USP that this film was from the producers of previous famous horror films. This is also used in thre traler for Hostel. We didn't have a budget either although these days that isn't always a problem since Paranormal Activity was made for only $10,000. For the location we used only two basements to work out of, film companies who have larger budgets have a greater choce of locations but fortuynately, because this was a horror trailer, I think we got away with the restricted settings as this is of the case with professional trailers such as Hostel.

I have composed 9 shots of our teaser trailer in order to demonstrate our effective use of mise-en-scene, shot sizes, camera angles, colour design, framing, characters used and graphics. Usually a horror movie with a monster in it will have make-up and special effects. We didn't have any of that (although we did have latex, but due to our movie being psychological, we did not use it) so instead we relied heavily on costume and props such as a big white lab coat, hoodie and a syringe. We used canted angles to reflect the confusion of the victim, a 360 degree tracking close-up of the victim but this needed to be edited since we filmed it twice, using different costumes. The continutuity worked well because the tracking shots we took lined up (after many takes!) The lighting on the scenes was enhanced in editing to make the production look hyper-real, reflecting the intensity of the scene. We varied the angles a lot using low angles and high angles to add to the sense of distortion and discomfort.