2. Common Codes and Conventions
Of Film Trailers
All film trailers have to showcase;
•The Company Logo
•Film Title
•Release Date
•Billing Block
3. When creating our film trailer we used
“Silent House” (a psychological thriller
trailer) as a guide line for effective shots
and ideas.
A common convention used in psychological
thriller trailers is keeping the protagonists
identity hidden through out the trailer.
We felt that the shadowed figure was a great
opportunity to briefly show the
protagonist but not reveal who it is
creating a sense of fear and obscurity.
4. Another common convention used in
psychological thriller trailers is showing an
equilibrium or a sense of reality. All successful
psychological thriller trailers have an
equilibrium at the start of the trailer, to
establish the story line. I felt that the
establishing shot of the location was important
and the family table shot shows the audience
who the plot surrounds.
5. Low lighting is a very important feature in
psychological thrillers, it casts a obscure
and mysterious atmosphere leaving the
audience with a intellectual puzzle . As you
can see low lighting is used in the “Silent
House” trailer and in other successful
psychological thriller trailers that I have
previously researched, therefore this
encouraged me to use the same effect in my
film trailer.
6. I feel that the most effective part of our
trailer was the quick edits towards the end,
I think that these build suspense and create a
sense of fear. From previous researching I
discovered that quick edits are a common
convention used in psychological thriller
trailers, seeing this in successful
professional trailers steered my group to
using more quick edits within our trailer.
7. Claustrophobic spaces are also a convention
for psychological thriller trailers,
however if is not as common as the others
that I have mentioned. Due to our film plot
surrounding a game of hide and seek I felt
that this convention would work very well
and after seeing it been used in the “Silent
House “ trailer I realised that it would
look effective and make the scene look
dark and mysterious.
8. Posters ;
For my poster I discovered how I would like
to lay out my poster by researching
different psychological thriller trailers
on Google images. After discovering the
“Secret Window” poster I decided that I
would like to showcase the main character
Emily hidden behind a door on my poster.
Then the layout was the same as general
film poster layouts. However I decided to
split up my tag line as it looked more
effective.
9. Film Magazine:
Before creating my film magazine cover I
researched professional film magazines to
look at effective main images, however
after receiving feedback from my focus
group explain how my film magazine cover
looked like a fashion magazine cover I
changed the magazine layout and image
using the “EMPIRE” layout as a template.
10. Overall I feel that real
media products had a large
influenced on both my main
task and my ancillary tasks,
I used successful and
professional products as
templates in order to
model my own professional
