Evaluation Task One - Narrative

I felt as if the research and planning stage was the reason why our story made a lot of sense. Thanks to the detailed storyboard that Dan had prepared, we had a clear idea and thus we believed our understanding would also give the audience a clear idea of how we wanted the trailer to look and what sort of a storyline it was trying to portray, also keeping in mind on how much of an impact we wanted to put on the audience, giving them the fear factor.

In our trailer, we wanted to convoy and conform our horror genre as much as possible, this is why we wanted to add so many different dark and scary scenes. We also followed the conventions of the horror genre as we decided to follow the Todorov’s narrative structure to a certain extent. The only bit that couldn’t be identified was the initial equilibrium and we done this on purpose to make it less conventional thus it being different, but also I felt that having an initial equilibrium will negatively affect what we are trying to tell the audience as we wanted to show that the actors, Dan and I, are on a mission from the beginning of the trailer, to the end, thus there is no equilibrium that we are happy with. Despite this, we followed the middle step of Todorov’s narrative structure, but due to it being a trailer, there is no ending as we don’t show what happens to the actors, which is the whole point of a trailer, not to give away too much information and want the audience to watch the whole film, but we are also making this conventional in some ways.

In the trailer, we aim to be as conventional as we can and try to understand these conventions, and this is what the audience is going to expect from the trailer and from the initial genre and thus we must follow them in order for our trailer to be successful and also to meet the needs of our target audience. We decided the way in which we would differentiate ourselves to any other horror genre, this is by reducing and using less conventions to surprise the target audience and not to make our film become a typical horror/drama movie where the audience can predict what going to happen next. During our research and planning into the horror genre, there was a noticeable theory, that the majority of the horror movies/trailers followed Todorov’s narrative structure and so we knew the relevance of this. It also helped us save more time when producing the trailer as it gave us both an initial idea of how we were going to set up our final product.

The Narrative of the story is very simple, two students filmmakers, wanted to find out the truth about the haunted cemetery, taking a few torches and cameras with them to capture the evidence. Later finding out the rumours about the cemetery are real, ending up losing each other and disappearing. I believe we got that across quite well, as we have titles in the trailer stating the situations.

Screenshot shows the title from the trailer where we are giving information to the audience about the narrative, this could potentially attract students and young adults as the story is involving people their age and their position (e.g. at school)