Narrative Structure

Within our trailer we found that we have used a lot of narrative structure elements when planning. We wanted our trailer to be as interesting as possible; this meant that we needed to give our film the best narrative structure.

We started our trailer with a shot of our main character at house. This shows the exposition in our trailer. We showed her at her house to introduce the part of the setting but also to show that she is a normal teenage girl living at home in a quiet place. We wanted to start our trailer with a positive atmosphere maybe giving a hint the something bad might be going to happen later on.

Most of the development in our trailer is seen in our planning. We meet our second character and see him in his normal day life and see why he is trying to hurt the female character. However, within our filming we see the male character develop a little when we see him in his house searching for his victim.

The complication is quite a big part within our trailer as it shows how the main character ends up in the bad situation shown within the trailer. Whilst driving to a friend’s house our main character is stopped at the sight of something being thrown in front of her car. Whilst investigating what this object is and who could have thrown it, our villain gets into the car. We shot this from in front of the car, having the car lights shining into the camera so that we can only see the female character, but can still hear the slam of the car door, causing panic in our character and hopefully the audience.

For our climax we wanted to show something quite creative to show the rising tension between the characters. We decided to do a montage between the characters and different scenes from within our film. The first shot of our montage is of the female character running through the forest, away from the villain, this is repeated once more but closer in to repeat the suspense. The other two shots placed between eh shots of running are of both our characters. The first of our female character in a red room, this creates suspense because it makes you as where she is and the red makes us think that this might be very dangerous. The second shot is of the male character kicking open a door, this cause more tension because we ask the questions, where is he and what is he doing?

Our resolution is not so happy in the trailer because our final shot is of our main character close-up hidden. We wanted to have our trailer end on a cliff-hanger and so we left it with a slightly negative tone to keep the audience wanting more.

Throughout our trailer, we have used quite a dark lighting to make the film denser, keeping the atmosphere negative and frightening.

Our trailer connects slightly to Vladimir Propp’s theory of characters. Although we only have two characters the fit into these stereotypes that he gives. Our main female character is the hero/victim as she is the one being chased through the fields and trapped in the red rooms. Our second character sit eh obvious villain in our trailer, as he is stalking and capturing our hero. Our trailer is not a stereotypical horror according to this theory as don’t have as many characters; however I feel that we don’t need many more characters to make it because we mainly wanted it to seem scary.