The concepts of story telling is essential for creating a story that both flows well and is coherent, while introducing characters, plots and subplots, twists and many other story elements. I will walk through the parts of these 8 concepts that we have tried to incorporate into our VFX movie trailer to show our though process throughout, obviously as it is a trailer and our first production of any type, some of the concepts may be difficult to meet and incorporate fully.
1) Begin with a question: We sort of do this literally when one of the officers asks the other, while on break “So what happened?” this leads to the other officer telling the story of his recent case and as he does we see flash backs to the actual incident leading to a case of dramatic irony where the audience knows more than the police officers in the scene.
2) End with an insight: At the end of our trailer we reveal that the killer is actually an android that had gone rogue but we don’t reveal why as that would be something that if it were a full movie would be the focus of the plot more so it would just spoil the entire movie.
3) Tell a compelling story: As it is only a trailer there isn’t a full length story however we try to tell a story over the length of the conversation to serve to draw viewers in by having the conversation the officers have set up sort of the back story to the plot but in a condensed format that leaves enough open ended for an actual movie if it was one.
4) Explain with visuals, narrate with words: This is again rather literal in the trailer as our trailer is literally a narration done through the conversation by the officers then the things they discuss are shown by flashbacks to the incident that the actual officers wouldn’t have seen or know about.
5) Be honest and credible: Doesn’t really apply to our format.
6) Be clear and concise: We kept our trailer to one short conversation as it is one that sets up the plot we wanted to go for but also includes enough content where we can create something interesting as we were slightly limited as we wanted more live footage but since we lacked a teacher for a while, we had to rely more heavy on matte paintings that we originally planned as that was what we already had knowledge and comfort with.
7) Know and cater to you audience: Again doesn’t apply as we don’t have an audience to show it to and the trailer is more about the quality of the VFX in it for us than the quality of the concept and delivery of it.
8) Provide benchmarks: Also doesn’t apply.
Overall, I think we did our best to incorporate a lot of the concepts into our VFX trailer to get the most out of it as possible while other stuff was impossible to add due to the nature of our task.
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