Explore the genre and conventions of your chosen media text. How do you plan to adhere to or develop these conventions?

The influences I have looked at will be extremely useful in formulating our trailer’s style and tone, as well as giving a good idea of conventions in terms of genre and medium. The genre we would like to associate our trailer with is Crime Thriller, which we will set in present day London. We feel like this genre will present us with something of a challenge but will give us an opportunity to produce an effective trailer. The genre has a large set of conventions, being one of the more popular mainstream genres, and these are things that we will have to consider and incorporate or challenge in constructing our trailer.

The construction of characters is one key part of the trailer, one that is prominently done with sound bites and close ups in the genre. Hummingbird and Only God Forgives are particular examples of the use of the close up as a technique for character building, especially in conjunction with dramatic lighting. In general the more ‘boyish’ trailers are the ones that rely more heavily on sound bites, V For Vendetta (‘People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people’) being a prime example, along with my other graphic novel inspired influence; Sin City. Rather than using a voiceover, as a Romance or Comedy film might, our film should convey narrative and character through imagery and sound bites, as it is more effective and the convention of the genre.

Setting is a key part of our current plans, and the utilisation of a London setting is something seen done very differently in Welcome To The Punch, Hummingbird, and V For Vendetta. Establishing shots are used in the two modern day settings, however Hummingbird uses a lower angle, something that is essential to us due to our lack of access to a helicopter, thus the mood that Hummingbird's establishing shot creates should be closer to our trailer than Welcome To The Punch. In order to continue this tone, our trailer should be more in the style of V For Vendetta, Hummingbird, or even non-London set trailers such as Sin City or Gangster Squad, in terms of presenting setting. This will involve lower camera angles and more depiction of poorer areas of London, whilst still keeping the location fairly central. An interesting point to make is that in the Sin City and V For Vendetta examples here, the figures tend to blend into the city setting, which is a clever technique in suggesting the nature of both the characters and the city and is a quick way to characterise aspects of the film.

Being limited as we are to setting our trailer in the present day, it stands to reason that we ought to adopt the lighting and mise en scene that fits with this. A certain realism will be required that distances us in some aspects from films such as V For Vendetta and moves us towards more realistic but still stylized films, such as Drive and Only God Forgives. Both of these films were directed by Nicolas Winding Refn, whose personal style of cinematography is not as 'in your face' as Tim Burton's or Bryan Fuller's, but is still distinctive and dramatically effective. Neither Drive nor Only God Forgives are set in London, however both use the lighting opportunities of a city interestingly and fairly unconventionally. The use of lighting in a trailer in the thriller genre can differentiate it from the many other action/crime/thriller films. The use of colour in the Only God Forgives trailer is particularly interesting to me, the use of reds, pinks and yellows giving an air of danger and associating this with the exotic setting. As a colour scheme it is vibrant and distinctive and allows for subtlety and atmosphere in close up shots, a bold titlecard, and an overarching sense of danger throughout the trailer. The starker blues used in the trailer are something that is used in some of our other influences, mostly to show a strip-lit or neon, bleak setting – often in conjunction with a redder or darker lit scene in order to produce contrast and dynamism. This dramatic mastery of colour in some of these trailers, especially Hummingbird, Only God Forgives, and Welcome To The Punch, is something we would very much like to emulate to produce a powerful and dramatic trailer of our own.

Imagery and iconography will be extremely important to our trailer, as the thriller genre comes with a large amount of it. Images of weapons, cars, explosions, suits, and cigarettes are prevalent in the genre and present in our influencing trailers. Sin City exemplifies the trademarks of the Noir subgenre, Welcome To The Punch of high class Crime Thriller, Gangster Squad of Gangster films, and Drive of modern Crime. Strong editing and camerawork, along with visually stimulating imagery produces icons that conform with the genre, some of which we will inevitably have to indulge in.

One of the most important aspects of a trailer is it's presentation of the title. In many films, especially more dramatic pieces (including thrillers) a black or dark backdrop is used with lighter text. This can be done in a wide range of ways; the neon effect used by Only God Forgives fits the film's specific style, Gangster Squad's art deco iconography and font adheres to it's subgenre, V For Vendetta's firey logo is aptly dramatic and graphic novel-esque, and Welcome To The Punch uses a blue backdrop which makes its bright blue text stand out. Simplicity is the common factor and is key to the creation of a bold and effective titlecard.

In conclusion, the Crime Thriller genre we have chosen to adhere to has a great many conventions and variations on these conventions, whilst still allowing flexibility and creativity in construction. Some of the key aspects that might signal our trailer out as part of the genre is iconography, pace, tone, use of setting, and sound. This leaves us to experiment with lighting and camera techniques to create an effective and original trailer with a style of its own that may differentiate it from other films in the wide genre and subgenre.

CM