This blog has been produced to document my promotional package for my horror trailer and the trailer itself. It also includes all of my research and planning into the project, in order for the trailer to appeal to my chosen target audience. Enjoy!

Saturday 11 February 2012

Film Trailer Analysis - Paranormal Activity 3


  
Paranormal Activity 3 is a supernatural horror film it is the third film of the Paranormal Activity series and serves as a prequel; set 18 years prior to the events of the first two films, released October 2011 and produced by Oren Peli.
A brief synopsis about the film is that in 1998 a young Katie and Kristi live with their mother, Julie, and her boyfriend, Dennis, Kristi begins interacting with an invisible friend named Toby. Dennis notices that since Kristi's friend appeared, strange things have been happening in the house. Dennis and Julie try to make a sex tape, but are interrupted by an earthquake. While they look for the girls, the camera shows dust fall from the ceiling and land onto an invisible figure in the room from this stage onwards many ghost and spirits begin to cause issues.

The teaser opens up with a technical TV connection problem to give us that sense of reality feeling more than fiction feel which makes the audience straight away view this movie as a type of reality scene where we should believe anything happening after the misconnection is real footage, a wide shot is then shown of Katie and Daniel wife Julie playing in the garden, the format of the camera is set as real life footage were we can identify the time and date this took place (Sept 03 1998 at 1:05:05) this denotation is again trying to stress that this is reality. A camera faulty transition is then used to cut to Katie showing a wide angle shot of her playing on the trampoline with Kristie watching, whilst the camera zooms in to Katie as Daniel is asking Katie to wave into the camera another camera faulty transition is used to cut to a medium close up of a female in in a room with Low-key lighting as the room has no type of high key lighting to create that cold darkness feel, to help push effect there’s a female shown rapidly moving towards the camera with a non-diegetic dramatic sound  effect. The quick change between the scenes from a family enjoying themselves out in the garden to a horrific looking woman in a dark room tells audience that they should be expecting some type of conflict, fans from the previous sequel would be able to relate to this.


The following shot is a close up of Kristie who looks like a troubled little girl compared to the normal Katie just by Kristie’s non-verbal communication, when Daniel asked her to also wave at the camera the audience straight away get a different feel from her as she looks at the camera in a type of shy mysterious looking way whilst smirking.


Another transition puts the audience back into this setting of the dark low key lighting house but this time it’s in a different room, a high angle shot Is used to show two people in this room of darkness walking until an invisible supernatural force drags them both across the floor into the same direction, a hard sound effect of like a gunshot is used for the match on action of the force. Still at this stage of the trailer the evil force stays unknown.


This trailer is put in an non-linear order as the audience is left in a state where they don’t know what’s coming next leaving them on the edge of their seats, as the next scene begins the pacing of the trailer starts to increase, the transitions and camera cuts pace increases to connoting that something big is about to happen as this is all taking place we hear two of voices which say “ what ever happened to us when we were little” another voice says “ I don’t remember anything” this  suggest that these two girls may have been the cause of the bad spirits leaving the audience wanting to know what happened in the past. As all this is taking place the background music starts build up and change the mood.


The rapid cuts start to show scenes of the past and present suggesting that it’s leading up to something, this theme has been common through this trailer the use of pace to demonstrate the activities that are going to take place is used a lot in this trailer. 


After the fast cuts it gets to a scene were everything slows down then a big part of the movie is put in the trailer were the two young girls Katie and Kristie are in a wide angle shot in the bathroom looking in the mirror, they turn of the light and chant “bloody Mary” three times but on the third chant non-diegetic sound is used to build up suspense making us think something may happen after the third chant, but Katie uses a prop to kill that suspense as she uses a torch light to scare Kristie leaving the audience thinking that’s the moral of that situation until they run of the bathroom the audience notice that a faint figure is there in the back of the bathroom standing there.


To conclude, after analyzing the elements that make a teaser trailer, based on what I’ve seen I’ve noticed that editing and sound and also camera angles are the most important factors of a good trailer the characters aren’t what make up a good trailer, the choice of sound has to match with the overall visual of what’s being seen, the camera shot has to be in the most relevant place so that we can be able to connect with it, editing has to be perfected so that we don’t see any faults. Also a teaser trailer shouldn’t give away the movie as it’s only made make audience what to watch more so this has to be thought in detail.

No comments:

Post a Comment