Black Swan Trailer Analysis

Momento trailer Analysis

Momento was released in 2000. The genre of the film is a physiological thriller. The audience are able to identify the physiological part of the film through the unstable emotional sate of the main character. There is also a set of mystery throughout the trailer regarding who killed the main characters wife. This employs the thriller side of the film because it gives the element of surprise and excitement for the audience. The film targets the age of 18 to 35 mixed genders. This is shown in relation towards the age of the characters being at the age of 30-40 and is shown in the violent of the scenes in the trailer appealing to people around the age of 18. The film trailer shows a relationship between a male and female which appeal to the female gender and create the target audience to be mixed genders.  The trailer lasts for 2 minutes and 22 seconds with 64 shots being used within the trailer. In the film trailer there are not many transitions that have been used. This could be towards the fact that the transitions take the seriousness out of the trailer. The diegetic sound towards in the film trailer enables the audience to understand the sense of narrative this is evident in the words “since my injury I cant make new memories”. This tells the audience about the physiological state of the man and what is wrong with him. Non diegetic sound is presented at the start of the trailer. This is evident with the sound of a fast car going past this emphasizes the confusion of the character as he doesn’t know were he is. Towards the end of the trailer there is also the sound of a light piano tapping and the sound of a violin. This emphasizes the mood and tone of the film trailer. The sense of narrative in the trailer is being told through the diegetic dialogue of the trailer. This is shown through the man telling us what is wrong with him and what he is trying to find out. The trailer reveals that someone has taken away his memory and it is the same person who has killed his wife. Telling us that the film is going to be about trying to find his wife’s killer, however creating that sense of enigma that even he could be involved into the death of his wife The opening shot of the trailer establishes the mood and expectations of the trailer. This is evident in a black and white shot of the man looking confused and not knowing were he is. This creates the mystery element of the film trailer and gives us an insight that he might have something physiological wrong with him. This then leads to the narrative of telling the audience what is actually wrong wih him. The expectations within the film are established through a variety of characters towards the fact that any of them could be involved in the killing of the main characters wife even him. Within the trailer there is a variety of close up shots of the main character to express his unstable emotional state. The studio used to market this film is called new market films.  I feel very critical when analysing the films target audience as I don’t believe the film trailer appeals to its audience of 18-30 because it doesn’t involve many key transition characteristics that other trailers may use to target its product.  Therefore this film trailer was not sufficiently effective as a promotional device for the film. However the reason for me analysing the film trailer was to see the psychological element of the film to study key ideas I could use for my film trailer. This is evident in the emotional state of the character and the sense of enigma to what happened to his wife and who killed her. The narrative of the trailer is also good not revealing too much of the real plot.

New trailer plot

The trailer starts with an establishing shot of the house. Then it cuts to a medium shot of David taking a drink from the fridge. When he closes it, we see the fridge door with magnets all jumbled up. There is then a tracking shot of him picking up his props from the table before starting to leave the house in a shirt and tie with a briefcase and coffee flask. When he gets to the door, he then looks over his shoulder and shouts “See you later Love”, before it fades out to long shot as he walks away. This fades in to a classroom where he’s teaching a science class.

   He is stood teaching biology to a sixth form class with a diagram of a cell on a whiteboard behind him. He begins to talk about how bad cells can lead to complications – “When a cell’s chromosomes do this…..complications can arise”. He appears distant before a student asks if he’s okay. Then the student’s voice fades out and everything becomes muffled. As a clock begins to tick, getting louder and louder, the teacher’s face appears panicked and upset, before returning to normal where he asks, “Where was I?” The scene then cuts.

   We then see him sat on the edge of the bed crying. Once again, the clock reads 11:57 and on the bedside table is a vase full of flowers.

   The next scene, we see him in the school once again. This time he catches a glimpse of something in the corner of his eye. He looks out the window to see his neighbour leaving the school grounds, this peculiar because the neighbour has no children of his own. Shortly after, he is called into the headmaster’s office where she tells him she thinks its best he takes some time off after everything that’s happened.

The next scene shows him at the door talking to the neighbour. He appears a lot more dishevelled (messy appearance and clothing) with a shirt sporting a stain and pyjama bottoms. The neighbour says, “Look David, a lot of us are worried about you. We know about the job and the” David then interrupts him with “I’m coming love”, talking to someone in the house before saying to his neighbour “I don’t know what weird, sick game you are playing but leave me and Lisa out of it”. He slams the door. He looks down after shutting the door to find his letters have been opened. He looks confused but suspects the neighbour.

   In the next scene, we see him washing his face in the mirror and he hears a man's voice saying, “You've got to move on, there's nothing you can do”. The next scene shows him in the living room flicking through channel after channel. It fades out and shows him doing it over a few days before music from a piano seems to wake him up from the trance – clubbed to death piano solo. He walks into another room only for the music to stop. The silence is then pierced by an alarm clock with the number 11:57 visible. Behind David we see his neighbour spying through the window out of sight of David.

   Next we hear half of a conversation, “So what do you fancy doing today, Honey? Just staying here? Sure if that's what you want” He then begins to hear ticking again as it approaches the same time as in the school. He looks over to the fridge to see the magnets arranged into words with a time underneath - “It's your fault 11:57”. He panics and becomes frozen to the spot when the sound of trash cans falling over snaps him out of it. He runs outside to see what it is just in time to see his neighbour try and run away. He catches him and asks what he's doing, when the neighbour replies, “Don't worry, you'll be looked after”.

The next scene shows him in the house. As he looks around, rooms begin to fade away until it is just Lisa's room. To check he goes in to find it torn up and messy as if there was a struggle. He runs outside just in time to see a car pull off.

   The film begins to pick up pace showing various scenes of David breaking down. These scenes are completely silent and in slow motion with the exception of the song playing over the scene as he breaks down in the corner, smashing plates, rips posters from the wall etc. We then see him in a room where the walls are covered in photos. The music begins to slow down as the scene slowly fades out and the stops completely. He wakes up in an unknown room where a nurse walks in saying the doctor will see you now. In the final scenes there is a black screen. We hear footsteps before it cut back in and his neighbour walks in and smiles maliciously. 

new film plot

David, aged 23 has a good job working as a biology teacher in his local comprehensive school, where he has a good relationship with the pupils and his fellow teachers. The film begins where we find David at a graveyard. He is sat in front of a grave stone, where he places a bunch of flowers. To whom this belongs to is made unknown to the audience.
   The audience then see David whilst in a lesson. He is taking a lesson on the topic of cancer, which causes him to act out of character. His usual happy self now appears uncomfortable and agitated. His odd behaviour continues, when the next day we see him check the time, this reading 11:57. This seems to alarm David, leaving him flustered. Hoping the children don’t notice, he swiftly sets the class a task, and he sits down at his desk in order to try and contain himself. He sits staring into space as if in deep thought, acting unusual to his normal character. David obviously seems distressed to his colleagues who advise him to take time off and work through his problems.
   David is now at home, when someone knocks on the front door. He answers to find his next door neighbour who has come round to check how things are. They have a brief conversation; however, he can hear someone playing piano in the house, although this is actually in his head. This distracts David, causing him to appear distant. This concerns the people around him even more.
   When the neighbour leaves, David returns to the house. While doing so, he calls upstairs, “It was only Mr Andrews again, want a cuppa love?” There is no reply and David pauses. The piano stops playing as he realises there isn’t actually anyone in the house. He returns to his kitchen to find the mornings post open which he has no recollection of. He then walks further into the room to find a message on the fridge. The message reads 11:57, the same time in which triggered his odd behaviour in the classroom. At this point, the man is convinced there is someone in his house leaving him in a paranoid state. Hearing the slightest of noise makes him overly suspicious, unable to feel comfortable in his own home, constantly feeling on edge.
   David starts calling the name “Lisa!” hinting to the audience who he believes is in the house. He begins searching around the house calling her name, behaving irrationally. He hears the piano playing once again, which leads him to a particular room. The room is full of mementos, where there are photos of a woman, presumably Lisa, plastered all over the walls. It now appears that Lisa is or was someone incredibly close to David, and was very important to him. This seems to be too much for David, where we see him emotionally breakdown.
   The film ends with David in a mental hospital. It is revealed that Lisa was in fact David's long term partner, who had died of cancer. David had difficulty dealing with what happened, unable to let go, where he continued to live as nothing had ever happened. This became too much for David, resulting in him being sectioned.

Changes made after the animatic

Towards the production of our animatic we have found as a group that our original idea was not capturing the codes and conventions of our chosen genre of a physiological thriller. Towards this result we have decided to go with Ruth’s first film plot. This is because her film plot matched the codes and convections of a physiological thriller. With our new film plot we expanded on it by generating ideas of our own, when doing this we looked at other physiological thrillers like shutter island and memento. When we have finally decided the full film plot we will create a trailer plot then convert the ideas to a story board before going onto the production of a film.

Pictures for Animatic

Animatic anlysis

At its simplest, an animatic is a series of still images edited together and displayed in sequence with a rough dialogue and rough sound track added to the sequence of still images to test whether the sound and images are working effectively together. The function of the animatics is to allow for the producers to work out any screenplay, camera positioning, shot list and timing issues that may exist with my current storyboard.

The first step to our animatic process was the storyboard. We created a storyboard from our trailer plot were we were able to generate ideas to a picture sequence.

 Completing the storyboard we were able to work out our shooting schedule. Within the shooting schedule we matched each location for the shots together and went from most important pictures to least important pictures. We then considered our actors as a group. We decided we had to consider an actor that can sustain our timing schedule and match the characters target age.  We chose our actors from our media group enabling us to keep a good timing schedule. Our next step was our photo shoot. During our photo shoot we did come across a relative amount of rain which caused us to postpone a shoot. However we were able to catch up on lost time.   We all took part in the photography of the animatic sharing the responsibility of each shoot. Towards each shoot we tried different types of shots this then allowed us to visually see which photo worked effectively and best for the animatic. Finishing the shooting we put the shots into the editing suite, as we edited the pictures and sound we became more familiar with editing transition. At this point we were able to revise our ideas visually on the screen and caused us to rethink our ideas.  Although we were forced to revise our original film plot and generate a new idea for a new plot we benefited from the experience in the editing suite.

We created and developed the narrative for the animatic through the storyboard. We cut out pieces from the storyboard and rearranged them in the appropriate order. From this we were able to see what works and what doesn’t work. We were also able to witness that that the storyboard reveals too much of the plot and were able to take out some shots that would create the sense of enigma. For example we had a shot of our main character dying but we realised we wanted the audience to question on what will happen to the main character.

Within the animatic we had 4 different shoots at 4 different locations. We chose our actors regarding appearance of character keeping in the tone of the film and matching the age of the character.  We wanted to get the age of 20 therefore we went with someone looking older for his age which was me. By choosing me we were able to follow the timing schedule.  During the shooting process we changed the type of shot and angles used within the shooting.  We also changed the location for a shoot when discovering construction in the way. The shots that we were unable to do were the train shots. We were unable to do these shots because they were unrealistic. After we finished the animatic we were caused to revise our ideas. This was caused because the animatic did not have the right codes and conventions of a psychological thriller. This was revealed due to the film matching the genre of an action adventure and not a psychological thriller.

We constructed the animatic by uploading all the photos and ordering the shots to a specific order. We were then able to add editing transitions, intertitles and a newly produced soundtrack keeping in tone with our animatic.

Choosing the length off shots began from the storyboard were we gave an estimated time for each shot helping us have a rough idea when going into the editing suite. When in the editing we were able to discover our length of shots were to long causing us to shorten the length of shot from 5 seconds to 3 seconds. We also made changes to transitions, at the beginning we didn’t start of great due to relishing as new software. However when we got more familiar with the editing process we were able to choose the right transitions.  We were able to speed up our time regarding transitions towards us having a rough idea in our story board of were we wanted them and how long we wanted them.

For the film title “Retribution” we went for the colour red we chose the colour red because it reveals blood and violence. We had this towards a black background to emphasize the serious of the title that we intended to bring. Within the animatic we also used intertitles to communicate to the audience. We used a black font for the intertitles showing keeping the serious tone throughout the story board.

The choice of soundtrack was not at all its best however it did have a positive effect on the animatic. . We created a fast track which adapted well with the fast pace editing towards the end. We also introduced a heart beat when we had a photograph for someone dying. This did however  decrease the serious nature of the photograph.

 Our completed animatic did not appeal to our target audience. This was firstly evident towards our genre. We wanted our film to be a psychological thriller with a mixed genre and an age of 18-35. However our animatic turned out to be an action adventure which would appeal to a lot younger target audience and it would be prominently male.

 Before the making of the movie trailer the animatic has caused us to rethink our plot. This was caused by not capturing conventions of a physiological thriller. Before we begin this new process of making a new plot we must go into more depth towards the research of physiological thriller. This would involve researching films like Shutter Island, and memento. This way we will be able to understand the true codes and conventions of a psychological thriller. We also have to think about realistic and appropriate location along with going into more depth of the soundtrack.  

These two shots below show the alter ego aspect of the film, without revealing too much. They are ultimately our greatest shots towards a target audience and our chosen genre of a psychological thriller. It makes the audience think twice about the main character and think that it isn’t him causing all the destruction.

This image makes the audience feel concerned for the character and trying to adapt a relationship between the audience and the character. This is caused by making the audience question why this happening to him.

  This shot reveals a man dying and makes the audience feel sorry for the other character because they can see a bond between the two character and see that he is about to loose a friend.

T This image shows the man being haunted by his alter ego; however this shot could be a lot better as the face expressions of the characters do relinquish the seriousness of the photo. 

   My role during the process of the animatic will involve contributing to the story board. Being the main actor of the film and being able to adapt with the target age and timing schedule making it easier for my group to finish the animatic on schedule. I also produced the soundtrack for the animatic and contributed to the editing transitions.