Location Mood and Tone

The tone and mood of the trailer will be paramount to its overall feel and success, so here I have used images found online, screen grabs from trailers, and our own pictures, to try and demonstrate some of the key ideas of our mood and tone.

As in many of our key influences for the trailer, the tone we would like to capture is invariably dark and thrilling - as comes with the crime thriller genre - with vibrant colours to capture the metropolitan setting and mark the film out as almost neo-noir in it's bold imagery and use of lighting. The use of location and setting will allow us, in part, to achieve these tonal ideas and images. The idea of the city is a central one to our trailer, specifically the city at night; an image that can be presented in a few different ways.

The light and dark contrast that comes with the city at night is a great thing to try and capture, and this is especially dramatic and vibrant in the Leicester Square, Chinatown, and Piccadilly Circus locations that are available to us. Influences on this thrilling and bright, yet subtly ominous mood  are primarily Welcome To The Punch and Only God Forgives. Vibrancy of colour abounds in London, and it would be great to capture this.

For more dramatic and darker/gritty scenes, London is awash in alleyways and street corners that can provide us with lower key lighting in soft yellows and whites. Hummingbird demonstrates that this can work well with the high key and multi-coloured lighting from other scenes and Drive depicts the city at night in a similar manner.

Inevitably given the genre, we will be inputting a chase scene of some description, and this can be given pace and drama by setting it on either the banks of the Thames, likely the south bank, or along the A4 between Piccadilly and Leicester Square. Similarly fast paced scenes from other trailers also include gunfights, however to attempt one of these would be unfeasible for us.

The mood we would like to create in our film is one typical of our genre; fast pacing and thrills, but with a serious and dramatic edge. The way in which our tone would be set apart however, is through the use of London locations and the scenery, lighting, and mood, that they can provide us with. We are not the high-octane City of London glamour of Welcome To The Punch, but neither are we the gritty, seedy feel of Hummingbird. However these films are great influences on us and hopefully we will be able to capture some of both of their moods to produce a trailer that showcases excitement and thrill as well as the seedier, grittier side of the criminal world.

CM