Sunday, 16 June 2013

Analysing a film trailer- Man of Steel

Man of Steel is directed by Zach Snyder and produced by Christopher Nolan and is essentially an origin story of the well-known, pre-existing Superman character. In terms of the genres of film outlined in ‘save the cat!’ this film is of the superhero genre (‘superhero’ referring to the structure of the story, not the fact that it is literally about a superhero). There are actually multiple official trailers for this film, but I will mainly focus on trailer 3.

Man of Steels 3rd trailer is 3 minutes in length, slightly longer than the average max trailer length of 2 minutes 30 seconds. The first thing we see are snippets all from the same scene, presumably near the begging of the film, as well as pieces of expository dialogue, also all taken from the scene, which explain the basic premise of the film. The trailer continues to do so but with different scenes and pieces of dialogue taken from throughout the film until about 2 minutes into the trailer. It should be noted that all the way through the trailer up until this point, a score from the films soundtrack has been playing and slowly been building in intensity, each cue becoming more and more dramatic as more scenes from the film are revealed.

At 2:00 the trailer pace of the trailer changes greatly, the edits become much quicker and the music more dramatic. The scenes being shown are now from the action scenes of the film, not the expository scenes as now the trailer is advertising the action and special effects, as well as the central conflict of the film, as there is voice over dialogue from both the films antagonist and the hero talking about how 'the world may not be ready for him'.

Finally, at 2:35 the music has reached its climax and has now become much less prominent, this brief part of the trailer focusing on the relationship between the two main characters with dialogue (similarly to the first part of the trailer) shown in context with the same scene it’s from, before the trailer ends with a final quick glimpse of action, to advertise that this film will balance both action and character development.

Some of the conventions found within other trailers of this genre is the single extract from the films soundtrack that plays consistently throughout the trailer and increases in tempo with the action being shown, such as in the ‘Iron man 3’ and ‘Thor: the dark world’ trailers, Thor especially is similar to man of steel due to the final scene in the trailer, giving one last look at the characters  after the music’s climax. Secondly is first half of the trailer setting up the premise of the film and the second half showing the action. The trailer I have found follows this most similarly is ‘The Wolverine’ trailer. This convention most likely keeps cropping up because the majority of these films are based on pre-existing characters, therefore some exposition is likely required in the trailer

Some ways that this trailer seems to break convention however, is the previously mentioned, unusual length of 3 minutes, as well as the emphasis on the characters and story in the first half of the trailer (exposited mostly in various pieces of dialogue) throughout the trailer, unlike the previously mentioned trailers which seem to focus on primarily on promoting the action and secondarily on the characters, unlike Man of steel which seems more balanced.

 
Man of Steel trailer 3- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6DJcgm3wNY



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