This session is a double whammy. While you'll be focussing on audience responses to film trailers, this lesson is also an introduction to the film industry topic, in particular the difference between major and independent cinema.
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| I love Con Air with every fibre of my being, but I hate everything that it stands for. How could this be possible? |
Con Air Trailer
Task one - Major and indie cinema
Major film productions are ones financed and distributed by a major studio, such as Disney, Warner or Universal. Independent cinema refers to films made independently of larger companies, with independent producers including Warp, Canal + and Film Four. There's lots of contention between what constitutes as an 'indie' film, but let's not worry about that just yet.
Watch all six of the below trailers, in order, and list the MANY differences that exist between indie and mainstream cinema. You will want to make reference to:
- Themes
- Budget
- Style
- Narrative
- Mise-en-scene
- Editing
- Soundtrack
- Genre and generic paradigms (clear or abstruse?)
Major, big budget, 'tentpole', mainstream, Hollywood productions (there are lots of ways of referring to major films!)
Guardians of the Galaxy 2 (Gunn, 2017)
Mission Impossible Fallout (McQuarrie, 2018)
The Fate Of The Furious (Gray, 2017)
Independent, indie, lower budget, niche productions
Sorry We Missed You (Loach, 2019)
Task two - Stuart Hall's encoding/decoding model
We sometimes refer to this theory as the 'PNO theory', i.e preferred, negotiated, oppositional. There are three, broad ways of responding to a media product, negotiating with the ideology of the producer. This isn't really bothered with if an audience 'likes' the product or not, but is concerned with how the audience accepts or rejects
Task 2-1
Pick one of the indie trailers and one of the mainstream trailers from above, and watch them both again
Task 2-2
For both of the trailers, identify the dominant ideology which is demonstrated. What message, value or moral is presented to the audience? How do you know this?
Task 2-3
Negotiating audience response. This is what happens every time we engage with a media product. We play a game of give and take with the producer, and decide which bits we agree with, and which bits we disagree with. For both of these adverts, outline the preferred, oppositional and negotiated response/s for each of them.