Initial ideas and research

When me and my partner Gareth decided to make a film trailer we already had some ideas for a horror film, and we also already had previous experience of making short horror films with our production last year of Paranoia, where we produced the first two minutes of a horror film. This of course set us up perfectly for a horror trailer.
Therefore, we started reasearching horror trailers from youtube, so we could learn/relearn the basic ideas of developing a horror trailer and how film producers try to entice you to watch the full film.

The first film trailer that I came across was 'Scary Mary Poppins', which although is not a trailer for an actual film, still gave us great insight about how a trailer can be very different from the actual film it is showcasing. Scary Mary Poppins uses existing footage of Mary Poppins, but through the combination of sound and editing makes it seem as though the film is a horror. Anyone who has seen Mary Poppins will know that it is actually a family friendly film, so it prooves how important editing techniques are and how they can effect the feel of the trailer.
Although the trailer's footage was initially shot by a large production company for a mass audience, the editing for this trailer was done by a small group of enthusiasts. This realistically shows us what could achieve in our editing if we made a similar effort to what this small company did.

Next Gareth showed me a trailer he found for Saw. We really liked how in the first 30 seconds of the trailer you see flashes like a from a camera. We saw how this sort of simulated lightning and raised the viewers tension. We also liked how the 'low rumble' sound that ended in an evil high pitched laugh added a sense of mystery to the trailer.
From this point onwards there were fades to black after displaying various characters, also adding a sense of mystery to each of these characters. By only seeing glimpses of these people it makes the viewer think of the possible storyline combinations, which is good as the more you think about how a film might end the more you would want to go and see it. We decided from this to use fade to black and flashes in our trailer.
This trailer also showed us that it is good not to give too much of the story away, so the viewer wants to see how it ends. This was good information to us as it meant that we did not have to think the whole film through, i.e. how it all links together, as we can partly let the viewers come up with their own ideas.