'Is Anybody There?' Poster Deconstruction

     This is a poster for the film 'Is Anybody There?' which is a British drama. Although we are doing a social realism trailer we decided to look at this film as it included an unexpected friendship between an older man and a young boy who is interested in the idea of the supernatural. 

It is obvious from this poster that the film is not a social realism as the fact that it has a famous actor in it is strongly highlighted at the to of the poster in a bold, yellow font. This shows that the actors are a main attraction to the film. 

The use of the colours blue and yellow makes the poster bright and also implies happiness. The yellow is reflected in the text, the bus stop and also in the young boys clothing, the only thing that does not fit into the colour scheme is the man's clothing which in entirely black, this creates a sense of mystery. He contrasts with the environment and the boy further suggesting an unlikely friendship.

Trailer Deconstruction: A Room for Romeo Brass

Codes and Conventions of Film Trailers

Through analysing film trailers we have established a few codes and conventions for film trailers. Firstly trailers start with he production company logo and a certification alert. The company logo can be themed in a high budget film, an example of this is Dreamworks. The films usually have names of actors within the film which may entice the audience into wanting to watch the film. Similar to boasting of names they may announce awards, nominations and highly recommended reviews.
Editing within the Film Trailers is very fast paced with many different camera angles which interest and excite the audience. There are key scenes from the film added into the trailer at random points to create suspense and interest for the audience.
Audio is also very important, non-diagetic music appears first in a Film Trailer and this ties in with the genre of the film, this soundtrack is also important to set the pace of the trailer. Voiceovers are usually used in trailers to tell the audience key parts of information which may not be shown on screen.
Lastly, the release date appears and is the final thing shown so the audience are more likely to remember it.

Sound Examples

This is the soundtrack to This is England. It is simple as only one instrument is used. The music is sombre and melancholic. The music is used as a motif throughout the film to signify traumatic moments in the narrative, it also acts as contrapuntal sound over the top of violence. We first considered using music similar to this however for a trailer we thought it was too morose and might give too much of the narrative away.

This music is an acoustic version of a mainstream piece of music by skrillex. This music is simple but effective. The use of guitar only as a soundtrack works well with a Social realism film as the films depict real life and everyday characters and this kind of music does not distract from the onscreen action and does not glorify working class life. 

    

After looking at many social realism trailers, such as somers town, Fishtank and The kid we noticed the music was primarily acoustic guitar or mainstream  music from the time, for example in This is England. As we cannot use copyrighted music we decided to use an original acoustic music. This piece is simple yet memorable, for these reasons we feel this would make a suitable soundtrack for our trailer.

Somers Town Deconstruction