Evaluation Activity 1 - Narrative

I felt as if the research and planning stage was the reason why our story made a lot of sense. Thanks to the detailed storyboard that I had prepared, we had a clear idea and thus we believed our understanding would also give the audience a clear idea of how we wanted the trailer to look and what sort of a storyline it was trying to portray. 

We wanted to convey our horror genre as much as possible and this is why we added so many dark and scary scenes. We also made it fairly conventional as we followed Todorov's narrative structure to an extent. The only bit that couldn't be identified was the initial equilibrium and we done this on purpose to make it less conventional thus different but also I felt that having an initial equilibrium will negatively affect what we are trying to tell the audience as we wanted to show that he is on a mission from the beginning and thus there is no equilibrium that he is happy with. Despite this we follow the middle steps of Todorov's narrative structure but we don't have an ending as it's only a trailer and we are also seen as conventional in that sense.

We aim to be conventional as we understand that these conventions are what the audience expects from genres and thus we must follow them in order for them to be successful and meet the needs of our audience. We decided the way in which we would differentiate ourselves to any other horror movie is by becoming slightly less conventional to surprise the audience and not just make our trailer a typical horror/drama movie. During my research, I noticed that the majority of trailers follow Todorov's narrative structure and so we knew the relevance of this. It also helped us save a bit more time as it gave us an initial idea of how we were going to set up our trailer.

The Narrative of the story is very simple, two students filmmakers, wanted to find out the truth about the haunted cemetery, taking a few torches and cameras with them to capture the evidence. Later finding out the rumours about the cemetery are real, ending up losing each other and disappearing. I believe we got that across quite well, as we have titles in the trailer stating the situations.

Screenshot shows the title from the trailer where we are giving information to the audience about the narrative, this could potentially attract students and young adults as the story is involving people their age and their position (e.g. at school)