Inspirational Generic Trailers

Here is a short list of trailers of the crime genre that I find inspirational and how they use various forms and conventions.

Trailer 1


Above is the trailer for The Dark Knight, 2008. Although this is primarily classed as a superhero film, the plot revolves around a villain and crime lord, The Joker, and the mob/gang in the city of Gotham. Throughout the film The Joker creates chaos in the city and terrorises citizens, obviously a crime in itself, and challenges Batman constantly to save people from his plans, unless he reveals his identity to them.

The trailer follows quite a few conventions of the crime genre, mainly concerning plot: there is a secondary theme of a love triangle (between two main protagonists, Harvey Dent and Batman/Bruce Wayne, and a woman, Rachel Dawes), and of course, the conflict between the binary opposites of cops and criminals (as well as the vigilante Batman). Throughout the trailer there is the familiar iconography of props such as guns and knives, as well as typical events such as threats to the protagonists' lives and big explosions to make the trailer seem action-packed and intense.

In terms of the technical elements of the trailer, a technique I have found that reoccurs in many crime trailers is the use of fade in and fade out transitions, often to black. The soundtrack in this trailer is synchronised to this, with the typical use of a loud, sudden bang noise that happens in time with each new shot appearing. As the trailer progresses, the shots get shorter in duration so there is less time for the viewer to process each shot they see (again making it seem fast paced and intense) and the editing changes from the use of fade transitions to simple straight cuts, increasing the pace further.

I find this trailer inspirational because, to me, it personifies many of the typical elements of a crime film trailer, and I think that the use of editing especially, to make it fast-paced, is a technique I would like to reproduce in my own trailer because it makes it so exciting and more extreme.

Trailer 2


Above is a trailer for Gone Girl, 2014. Its plot centres around a man, Nick Dunne, and his wife, Amy Dunne, who goes missing. It becomes the focus of the media and Nick soon finds himself as the prime suspect in the investigation, as people begin to doubt that he could really know nothing at all of the disappearance.

This trailer differs quite a lot from the trailer for the Dark Knight in the way it displays conventions: such as how the soundtrack isn't the typical silence to a loud bang repeatedly as a suspense-creating technique, and is instead a soft piano track during the introduction of the characters and their at first happy equilibrium, which transforms into more tense music later on as the plot escalates. Although, like other trailers of this calibre that I have studied (such as Prisoners, 2013) there is the contrast of binary opposites; the cops vs. the suspects, in this case, Nick and the detectives. The trailer also presents the intriguing enigma of Amy's disappearance to draw the audience in, and gives snippets of when she is writing a diary that amongst other troubled entries reads, "This man of mine may kill me."

The typical iconography shown in this trailer includes crime scene props such as yellow tape, and press conference cameras flashing at Nick as he reaches out to the public for help finding Amy. The iconography seen in The Dark Knight's trailer such as guns and explosions do not appear in this trailer, due to the differences in nature, but the editing is similar as they both use straight cuts that increase in pace during the trailer to make it intense.

I find this trailer inspiring because to me, it breaks the conventions of a regular crime film of the 'disappearance of a loved one' theme, and I like how the plot is about police and general public's growing suspicion of Nick, and isn't the typical plot of a family desperate to find the missing person. I also like how it raises questions to the audience, such as the elaborate nature of Amy's diary and the contrasting ways in which Nick is presented through the diary compared to how he appears to everyone else. In my own trailer, I would like to create a plot that defies conventions and presents an enigma, perhaps not of the murder or disappearance theme, but unique nevertheless.