R22 - Visit to the BFI (Radio Trailers and Posters)

Today I went to the BFI where we looked at the conventions of film trailers and Posters. We had found that the trailers of films play a major part of an overall film marketing campaign. We had looked at trailers for films such as: 'Frank', 'Star Wars the force awakens', 'The Inbetweeners 2'. Some of the conventions of film trailers that are applicable to radio trailers and horror that we came across were:
- The name of distributors foreground
- Non- linear narrative
- Key action parts
- Introduced to characters and settings
- Fast paced editing
- Not giving away any spoilers

These factors will be useful when making our own radio trailer.

We also looked at posters for films such as 'Frank', 'Star Wars the force awakens', 'The Inbetweeners 2','Jaws', 'Submarine' and 'The Queen'. What we identified was that most of the films have a house style, where the trailer relates to the poster so the audience can easily notice the film. Also we can identify from the poster what film genre they belonged to by looking at the images and font and colour use, which is an important factor to keep in mind when creating our own poster for our short horror film.


There was also a guest speaker, Hannah, who works on creating trailers for films. She gave us some tips on creating our radio trailer for our film. She said that music is the foundation of everything and when making trailers for horror films you need to have a horror environment, simple music - Piano  and that we should play around and experiment with different sounds.

The most important factor of trailers according to Hannah, is the way it starts and ends which must be good in order for the audience to watch it.