Film Trailer Portfolio - Sacrament

Film Trailer Portfolio

Sacrament

Part 1

When the task of creating a film trailer was first put to us, I had several ideas for the movie’s context. The first was of a movie in the action genre that dealt with revenge, whilst the other two were in the horror genre. The horror genre appealed to me more, as a low budget film can still have the desired effect by use of different filming techniques, and I wanted to depend more on a psychological aspect. My first idea was to do a film about a poltergeist. I had watched several films such as “Poltergeist”, but wanted to create a film that relied less on visual effects, something that leant towards the style of Albert Hitchcock, who is still seen today as the “Master of Suspense”. This Poltergeist idea did intrigue me, but I could not think of a plot thick enough, or original enough to capture an audience.

The remaining idea was more original, and would create the correct feel of the horror genre. This idea leant more towards several horror films from the 1970s, when a crop of films also used religious undertones to great effect. My idea was for an ancient relic to be uncovered that posed a threat to religion, an idea that didn’t require special effects or large production values. I took this idea and tried to further it by thickening out the plot for the trailer. To do this, I researched other films in the same genre.

I looked directly at three films from the last three decades, “The Exorcist”, “The Name of the Rose” and “The Sixth Sense”. I was first attracted to these films by the techniques that had been used to produce the desired effect on the audience.

The Exorcist (William Friedkin 1973)

This is a preview of the whole essay

The Exorcist (William Friedkin 1973)

This film was of enormous influence to my own trailer, both in its context and the techniques used by Friedkin to shock and suspend. I purchased the Exorcist DVD, which featured a making of documentary. Here I learned of Friedkin’s strict attention to detail, and also uncovered some of his secrets that made the film so effective. The film features two main techniques throughout the film that I immediately thought about adding to my own film, those being the use of lighting and sound. The film moves from very bright light scenes, such as the films opening in the Middle East, to the darkness of “Georgetown” (the films setting), or from the clean and well-lit living room of the house, to the black and gloomy mist of the girl’s bedroom. Why?

The sound was used similarly, from eerily quiet to sudden loudness, one scene that uses this is the sharp cut from the Priest’s gentle dream of his mother, to the piercing scream of the little girl. Why

The use of restful music as the main soundtrack in “The Exorcist” added to the “loud and quiet” technique Friedkin used, to create the sense that everything is calm. I myself began my trailer using this technique, with some gentle music, so that when things begin to go wrong, the impact is more substantial.

The voice that was created for the “demon” in this film was dubbed in synch after the scenes had been shot. I used this technique to dub in the voice of the priest in my trailer, the line “I dare not say” was recorded by microphone input into the computer. This was so the whisper was clearer and could be made more powerful, giving a sense of evil.

The Name of the Rose (Jean Jacque Annaud 1986)

This film centred on the church in medieval times and so the lighting used was minimal, to give both the sense of the period, and for effect. Lighting is mostly produced by candlelight in this movie, something so simple, yet effective. I immediately wanted to use a lot of candlelight in my own trailer. On film, this created a mystifying feel, due to the flickering of the flame.

The Sixth Sense ( 1999)

This was a modern day horror/thriller, and by watching the documentaries on the DVD of the movie, I discovered a technique Shyamalan had used as a reference. Whenever the young boy’s “sixth sense” came into play, the colour red was always on screen, sometimes clearly, often unnoticeable. I as a passive member of the audience did not realise this clever detail until I watched the interview with the director. I wanted to use this particular technique of recurrence, so I included a simple shot of a candle that kept returning throughout the trailer, with the flame flickering if uncertainty was about to occur, such as before the priest’s line “I dare not say” when asked who he was.

After watching these three films, I had several ideas of how my trailer would look. As regards to the plot of the trailer, I decided I only wanted to give away minimal pieces of the storyline, and let the audience decode the general idea through voiceovers and several shots that occurred. One example of this is during shots of inside a church and a graveyard, accompanied with the voiceover clip:

“What about the parchment?”

“I will look for it now”. This creates the idea that something is missing, with the swiftness in the second line of speech indicating that this is a critical moment.

The trailer footage was recorder on a Panasonic Digital Camera, and was edited using Pinnacle Studio software on a PC. All of the footage was shot without the use of a tripod after several experiments to see what presented the storyline the most effectively. Most notably at the beginning of the trailer, a short zoom shot towards a radio speaker was attempted with a tripod, but the elegant and fixed camera movement lacked the character and ambience that was available when recorded handheld, especially with the emotional sound bite that accompanied the shot.

I decided to use two different tints

Editing during “I dare not say”

I wanted the speed of the trailer to change when I was editing, from calm and mellow camera movement with slow transitions, to brisk and abrupt movement with quick transitions. This was my idea of representing chaos.