FMP - Week 4 Overview

With week 4 I now started to look at how to put together a film trailer, in terms of editing the sequence and the basics for writing the story for a film. I read a few articles that covered lots of fundamentals that apply to certain genres and styles of trailers. These all taught the rights and wrongs behind a different trailers and showed the actual importance of a movie trailer. One quote I especially liked from an article I found was relating editors to cooks; "Editors, particularly trailer editors, are like cooks. They take their footage (their materials) and boil them down, condense them and extract their essence in order to flavour the overall meal" They in theory extract the key points of a story to allow the audience to build up an idea of the film.

I also learnt about the different stages of a trailer, the three Acts to a trailer. Act 1 is introducing the characters and the world the story is set in. Act 2 is complicating the characters world with obstacles for the protagonist to overcome and then Act 3 is intensifying this conflict and ratcheting up the tension to increase the excitement and risk drawing the audience in. 

There were so many small points that I personally had picked up upon from watching trailers that these different articles reinforced, showing me that I was heading in the right direction (which was very comforting). 

I then decided to look at the continuity of trailers in relation to the chronological order of film. I found an article that dissected a handful of trailers from films that were all nominated for 'Best Picture' in the 2013 Oscars. 

These were; Silver Linings Playbook, Argo, Beasts of the southern wild, Lincoln and Amour. Originally I thought they would follow a very similar pattern, even though I did not know what this pattern would be, if they were all to be nominated for the my prestigious award at Oscars (in my eyes). However I was completely wrong and quite polar to each other. 

The two most films I enjoyed the most; Silver Linings Playbook (SLP) and Argo were briefly similar in shape. SLP followed the generic start to finish route in the trailer with the end of the trailer falling into a bit of madness which is what I expected, however Argo jumped between end scenes and early scenes constantly. This is obviously to grab the attention to the audience as the all the visually stimulating scenes are at the end of the film. This is something I may want to expand upon myself to grab the attention of the audience. 

I then decided to visit a couple of exhibitions, to any last inspiration before fully developing my storyline. I went to see Richard Hamilton at The Tate Modern and Martin Creed at the Hayward Gallery, I also went to the British Film Institute (BFI) to have a look around the library and their archives. Although I did come across some very interesting topics and ideas especially in the Martin Creed Exhibition, I didn't find anything that made me think "Wow, I should do something like that". Nothing directly correlated to my subjects which was a little annoying. If there was anything that I honestly took away influenced from the exhibitions is too look into more of the substance of what stands in front of you. 

In Richard Hamilton there were pieces of art which give different pictures when look at from different angles, so may be allow the audience to be able to reason with actions from different characters? In which case what sort of events would make people think of taking sides. These are all things I can take into writing my narrative.