Creating films can be very expensive due to the duration and skills involved in order to bring it together. This concludes that they will operate in a loss for the first couple of years in the making until the launch of the film when they start to get a return on their investment. Many films do not break even due to not selling enough copies to fund the investment they put in to it, therefore, in order to make a return on investment, the film will need to become a ‘box office hit’ where it is the centre of attention. The marketing campaign is therefore very important as this could make or break the success of the film. It needs to be effective to gather a wide audience as well as being short as long types of media can be boring and may deter the consumer. This is one of the reasons why £100,000s are invested into the marketing campaign as a high interest in the film suggests a high return on investment.
New technology has enabled many viral campaigns to become very wide spread in a short amount of time. The new blackberry’s and iphones are equipped with instant messaging software where information can be widespread as many forward things to each other resulting in a huge audience. This means film companies can easily create a website or another source of communication in order to get in touch with the audience.
A trailer is an advertisement of a film that will be released at some point in the near future. It explains the story in the film but in a condensed way in around 1 minute to 1.5 minutes (maximum 2.5 minutes) in order to inform the audience of what the film is about. The creation of the trailer is done in line with the editing of the film
It consists of the best scenes in the film in order to attract a wide audience, however, not too many scenes to create a spoiler. They normally follow a three-act structure where they begin with the first act which sets the scene, then one from the middle where it drives more into the film and has a bit of a climax and lastly the last section of the trailer which makes the audience question what they see and want to know more. In the trailer, information is also presented such as the release date, producer, director, where it will be released and other conventions. Sometimes, the trailer contains scenes which you won’t find in the film which is due to the fact that at the time the trailer is made, the final edited version of the film doesn’t exist and trailer editors work from rushes or dailies.
The most important convention of a trailer is a sound; in particular, voiceover as it is an unseen voice which helps the audience understands what is happening by either setting the scene in the beginning to providing an explanation when necessary. However, in some cases, no dialogue will be more effective in conjunction with sound effects as this will ensure certain feelings which the writer wants to deliver can be achieved. In my case, there is not much dialogue present in horror trailers but sharp, quick and scary sounds in replacement.
