My initial thoughts on the style/genre I wish to work in

My initial thoughts about the genre I wish to work in revolved around Horror; I have chosen the Horror genre because there are a wide variety of styles you can use when making a Horror film. I liked this style of film particularly because Horror films are not overly action packed liked your everyday action film would be, but instead it uses music and tension to create an atmosphere and convey it to the audience. This being said it will be easier to make a trailer for the Horror film because there are not as many standard conventions that have to be followed when compared to the action genre (Cars, Girls, Guns, Explosions, etc.) I also believe it should be quite easy to convey the films genre through this medium because of the standard conventions of horror which would include tense music, screams, dark lighting, and blood and gore etc. making a nice list of things to put into the trailer. Also, Horror films do not usually feature big name actors which means our trailer will not have to feature any recognisable actors to be successful.

Below I have listed the the most successful film genres from 1995 to 2012

As you can see from the figures above, the most successful film genres are comedy, adventure, drama and action. The reason we did not make a trailer in these genres was because most action and adventure titles have a high amount of expensive special effects like explosions and car chases etc. 

An example of a top selling film of 2012 would be 'The Avengers', this film made a total of $1,511,757,910 at the box office,  making it one of the best selling action films of all time. The reasons why it was so successful would be because of the all star cast featuring the likes of Robert Downey jr., Samuel.L.Jackson, Chris Hemsworth, Jeremy Renner, Scarlet Johansen and more, which alone would be enough to attract an audience, along with the full spectrum of special effects, the CGI alone costing a fifth of the entire expenditure. Robert Downey jr. was paid $50 million for his role in the action blockbuster. When you compare the budget and tools available to most action film productions to our own media project, we do not have anything capable of producing the effects needed, making this genre not applicable for our groups trailer.

Another example here is 'The Hobbit' one of Peter Jackson's latest films, this is an Adventure film and as the trailer and film show it uses a wide variety of settings and scenes, some of which are hand crafted by background specialists, others are filmed on location and lastly, CGI constructed. The location filming was all done in New Zealand which had the appropriate landscape for the film and they had the money to take the crew and actors around to any location filming. However, we are limited to a crew of four people and any locations had to be within reasonable driving distance. This makes an Adventure film/trailer hard for our group to do because the location variety will not be as most Adventure films feature.

and a comedy trailer has to be funny and not give away all of the key joke moments in the production while still maintaing an incentive for the audience to see the production. Also, writing comedy is very difficult to do and the dialogue and sound quality has to be exceptionally good in order to make the comedy moments stand out. An example of a successful comedy production would be Happy Gilmore, this is partly because of the star vehicle of this production which is Adam Sandler. Having an established and well renowned comedy actor in the main role of a comedy film, would have a profound effect on the target audience of the film as it would appeal to fans of not only comedy film, but also fans of Adam Sandler as well. However, we cannot afford to have such actors in our trailer, which makes it not viable for the genre of our trailer.

Finally, Drama was also not a viable choice for our production as most Dramas use a wide array of character archetypes requiring lots of actors to participate in it's production and as we only had a limited amount of people to star in the trailer, it would have been unlikely that the trailer would have met the common conventions required by this genre. The example featured here is 'Django Unchained' the most recent production from Quentin Tarantino, also feature big acting names such as; Jamie Foxx, Leonardo Dicaprio, Samuel.L.Jackson and Christopher Waltz. All of these actors have their own fan bases, again making it hard for our production to follow such conventions.