So, to start off, I'm looking at what genre I'm interested in doing and which I can feasibly do with my $11.30/hr budget in South Florida. I decided to look at a few different types of trailers and see what would best fit into my capabilities.
Starting off with... action.
I decided to look at the trailers for The Bourne Identity, Baby Driver, and Snowpiercer, which I have included in this post right below! I didn't seek out a particular trailer, I went with the first one that came up when I searched it, so long as it was a full-length trailer.
Bourne Identity is a super important film in the action genre, marking a shift from James Bond to a more gritty, realistic version of the genre. It was literally a gamechanger in the genre. So it only felt fair to look at this trailer as an example of what action trailers look like. It's very stunt-heavy and involves a good amount of weapons and props I don't really have access to. It's interesting, but I don't think I quite have the resources to pull off something similar.
The same goes with Baby Driver. I do know a professional stunt driver who's a customer at my job. He's fond of me and I think I could get him to help me out. My issue is that it's kind of illegal to do stunt driving without some type of permit, I assume. I'm not really sure if that's the path I want to take with this portfolio project. While it would be interesting, this is time-sensitive and it would involve calling in a LOT of favors.
Snowpiercer is interesting in the sense that it doesn't involve as many stunts or weapons, it's mostly concentrated at the end of the trailer. It involves very heavy set dressing and intentional mise-en-scene elements, which I could do, but I don't want to drain my bank account, especially when I have a lot of expenses coming up soon (thanks college!) Also, I'm not sure doing an action trailer would be very school-appropriate, as they tend to be PG-13 or R-rated. As a result... let's move on.
To the chick flick!
Yeah, there's some discourse surrounding the term, but we're going to ignore that for the purposes of this blogpost. I won't be addressing romance movies on their own because I'll be categorizing them under the chick flick genre for my research purposes. Chick flick is basically a film that is marketed primarily towards women.
I made sure that all of these are more modern as the chick flick is more sensitive to the passage of time compared to action movies. I looked at Me Before You, To All The Boys I've Loved Before, Girls Trip, Crazy Rich Asians, and Someone Great.
Me Before You doesn't involve many complicated sets, mostly scenes between the two main characters bantering and a very (in my opinion) cute customing of the main female lead. It doesn't involve many extra characters, there are no complicated sets (I can simply not include a fancy gala scene for obvious reasons), and it employs some techniques I used while doing my last set of trailers. Chick Flicks are off to a strong start, I'm feeling pretty inspired.
A lot of my previous thoughts reoccurred while watching To All The Boys I've Loved Before. Though, I can't really film in a school this year... it'll also make it painfully obvious how empty the background is. However, no one said I had to do a school-based story (so I very obviously won't!) However, I love how the trailer was color graded and the attention to aesthetics in this trailer, I definitely want to be incorporating it into what I end up doing. Incorporating the traditional romance clips with a few humorous ones definitely categorizes it as a teen romantic comedy, which, I'm definitely interested in doing.
It's quite obvious that this trailer, in contrast to the other two, is being marketed to a much older audience of women. Super interesting how they fall under the same genre. While this brought a lot to the table for me to consider (especially the aspect of maybe not even including a romance and instead focusing on female friendship,) I'm not sure I'll be doing something very similar.
This brought up an interesting thought that I stupidly didn't have before: I could do some visually interesting split-screen moments because it's not actually a movie... Wow. I think it works well and I'll give it a try. The subject matter is obviously not one I can take inspiration from but some of the editing techniques create a lot of that visual interest, I'll be making a blog post in the future to show off me trying them out.
This trailer really impressed the importance of an almost "theme song" for the marketing campaign. Lizzo's song "Truth Hurts" does a lot of work in setting a tone and the general vibes for the film. A lot of the other trailers did it as well, but I feel like it's most prominent here. One thing this does prompt me to think about is, is there such a thing as going to current? A lot of what's in the trailer will be super out of date in a matter of 3 years. It's only 2 years old and feels a bit dated already. While there's nothing wrong with being unapologetically a product of your time, is that the path I want to lead myself down?
I only went over Once Upon a Time in Hollywood for reasons I'll dicuss below
No diss on Tarantino, but I realized pretty immediately that I wanted to go with something in the Chick Flick genre pretty immediately. Not that those movies don't fall under comedy (though, I watched Someone Great, and calling it a comedy is a bit of a stretch...) but I want to create something targeted towards women. That's just what seems more fun to me. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood obviously has a lot of technique that's interesting, but I've realized it's not what I want.
No comments:
Post a Comment