Birds Remake Trailer - Production Journal - Day One

Today was the first day of our trailer brief. We all got put into groups and took a vote on which of the Birds Remake that was pitched the week before gets the trailer treatment, Wingad's, Jack's, Manuel's, Nathan's and My idea was selected. I was put into a team with Katie and Cannon to work on Jack's adaptation. We started the day in a quiet room looking through the treatment Jack had written for us, we broke this down bit by bit discussing the areas we would have to avoid to fit the requirements, this is how that breakdown/meeting went.


The Trailer will be...

• 1 minute in length.
• Contain at least 4 lines of dialogue
• Contain no more than three people.
• Contain voice overs
• Contain text/graphics on screen.
• Contain no more than three shots of birds.
• It can contain visual references to birds (such as feathers.

Breakdown Of Script: - Set in Cape Hock

• Can't use scene of her being fired

This is due to us coming to the decision that we shouldn't waste the third character on a small character, such as the boss, or the hotel owner (which is mentioned in a little while.)

• Car Accident - KEY SCENE! This is also our first use of birds.
• Scrap the hotel bit. Instead, have it were she wakes up at Alexander's house

This is also due to the fact that this will add another location to our schedule.

• Asked to hang out by Eva.

We still aren't sure whether to include this part in the trailer, it involves making the little sister (Eva) as our third character.

• Jean is desperate to stay around and hang out with Alex
• Attack on the school

With scenes like this, I do think of how we would go about shooting, this is something we will have to discuss as a team at a further date, my first thoughts are to make the trailer more of a romantic comedy, so to avoid casting a lot of people and "big" scenes, such as the attacks.

• Suspicion towards Jean after the attack
• Jean and Eva head to Alexanders house
• Jean begins to hallucinate believing that the birds are her family, she lets them inside the house.
• While Jean is being attacked, she hallucinates that she is in hospital bed.

We ran with the idea of hallucinations a lot during the first day of plan, it is a key componant to this adaptation, and will be touched upon and worked on at later dates.

What We Are Going To Include In Our Trailer

• Voice Over

This is imperative, and will be scripted at a later date, I will talk about this in my research.

• Establish that she is an obsessive fan

I touch upon this in my mindmap. It is difficult to establish this without showing the character to be a bit of a unsympathetic, unnerving character.

• Car Accident (First Bird Scene)
• Jean Meeting Alex
• Dream Sequence - Hospital Bed

                                      - Hallucinations

Research
For research, I will be predominantly talking about what I saw in The Dark Knight Rises trailer but note that I found this is a lot, if not, all trailers I watched.

Trailers always tend to start with something like this, indicating a age rate on the following footage.

It will then cut to shots of companies...

...and more companies...

...I counted, it was 10 seconds of companies and logos hitting the screen before I saw anything from the actually movie. This is to credit companies that worked on it, and in the case of The Dark Knight Rises, show the company that owns the franchise.

It then cut to scenes, and footage from the movie. I found that trailers have a trick, in which they dub over dialogue with another scene, in DKR's case, it is establishing shots off Gotham City, I feel like this is to get away from just showing a scene from a movie, it is showing a snippet, plus, it also gives the editor of the trailer permission to use another characters reaction shot to dialogue from another scene to build on what is being said.

Trailers also show big names attached to it, we can clearly see the actors who are involved from the footage we are shown, but directors also get shown, as well does sentences such as "from the Producers of Transformers". Again, this is entice people to go out and watch it.

As for the footage itself, trailers I watched tended to follow a bit of a formula. Start with story, showing snippets of that story, maybe with text or dialogue to help, then build the action, tension, with a build up of music and fast paced shots, again with text hitting the screen to help. This defiantly has to be something we look into more and work on when it comes to our own work.

Trailers also give a release date, they always seem to be vague "This Winter" "Next Summer" tends to get used quite a lot. T.V trailers tend to be the ones that give a release date as they are released nearer to the date.

One final bit of text I found myself seeing a lot is this one, again it gives a vague release date but also informs whether it will be released in 3D etc, in some cases, I found a tag-line to finish of the trailer.