Aspects to consider when making a film trailer

Aspects to consider when making a film trailer

When making a film trailer, the aspect of the storyline should be considered to instantly engage the audience to the visual text whether it is a great piece of dialogue between characters, a jolt of a kind of particular music. Then the storyline of the trailer needs to escalate in which for my genre of a zombie horror it needs to get progressively creepier and creepier as the trailer goes on keeping the audience engaged with the text throughout, then you have a great way to finish the trailer. The way, in which people’s (audience) brains are wired, they have short and long term memories in which they will mostly remember the beginning o f the trailer and the end of the trailer which gives them an overall impression of the film through the first few seconds of the trailer and the last few seconds of the trailer which is vital and has to be good.

When making a film trailer, think non-linear, in which a segment of a scene or film can be taken and be reconstructed through other micro-elements such as editing which almost creates a different perspective of the narrative to the audience when watching the film trailer to watching the actual film itself and recreate that scene in a suspenseful way in terms of a zombie horror trailer as this conforms to the conventions of a zombie horror which shouts out to the viewer that “this is a zombie horror “. The reason why this is done as the makers of the film want to target their correct audience and this technique allows their target audience to easily identify the genre of the product. This technique also creates and a different story direction in which the audience guesses where the story is going but at the same time the actual film will not go the same direction the audience is predicting thus giving away no surprises of the film which this creates hype for the audience through syntactic meaning and therefore the audience experiences visceral pleasure and the pleasure of intellectual puzzles (Altman) as they are curious of the narrative of the film and will want to watch more.  One of the aims of the trailer is for the audience to experience visceral pleasures and intellectual puzzles whilst informing the audience about the product they are advertising.

A trailer usually highlights particular scenes and tends to cram maximal value from particular moments from the film onto minimal on-screen time.

Another asset to be considered is originality within trailers which are the defining moment of trailers which make them standout from the other trailers. Most unique ideas of trailers usually have spin-offs from that particular idea of that trailer which the audience will see numerous trailers with the similar convention made where an original idea separates a particular trailer from the rest which will have the most interest from the audience as it is something that the audience has not seen before.

When designing a film trailer, professional designers recommend that trailers should not be over sold and use interesting dialogue and music to exaggerate the product but not to over exaggerate the product as viewers/audience may lose interest of the product.

Another asset of a trailer that should be considered is to not over complicate but one should make the trailer in the way in which make them as an audience want to go see the film and should not make too many changes as the quality of the trailer may decline. Overall the designer of the trailer should do what their instinct tells them to do as it is normally right.