Monday, 5 December 2011
Film poster
Analysis of Harry Potter Trailer
The Harry Potter soundtrack plays in the background with immediately distinguishes the film as it is such a worldwide known film. The Harry Potter films have been being made for 10 years making The Deathly Hallows: Part 2 such an important trailer as it is the end of an era.
Warner Bros has been hugely involved with the making and advertising of the film and this has worked well for them as it has been so successful. The Warner Bros logo has been adapted into the trailer to make it known who it came from. It also fits in well with the harry potter theme as it is dark and sinister like the film.
The trailer begins with clips from the very first harry potter film that was released and comes up with the words 'Every moment he has lived, has lead to this' which makes it even more exciting as it gets the audience thinking what has it lead to?. Clips from the previous films are shown to show just how far the film has come and increases the hype created by the audience to want to watch the film.
The music played in the background is very dark and sinister also creating suspense as to what will happen and what has the previous stories lead too.The song which is harry potters trademark seems different to normal with it being of a higher pitch and sounding like it being sung by a woman making it mysterious. You then hear Voldemort speak saying "You have fought valiantly, now join me harry and confront your fate" and then shows 5-6 clips of the film but in the space of 4 seconds which gives the audience a small insight of the film which is enough to make them start guessing and want to see the film now. They also coincide with the pace of the music becoming faster with the music changing to upbeat making it more exciting as it reveals a little more of the plot.
The clips that are shown contain alot of text and quotes which is enticing the reader and starts to get them thinking as to what is going to happen such as "the boy who lived, come to die", "Come on Tom, lets finish this were we started, together" and 'Tell them how it happened that night, how you looked him in the eye, a man who trusted you, and killed him'. All this keeps the audience guessing and creates suspense. It also sees them trying to work out who is talking in each quote.
Throughout the trailer it is dark and in a way scary meaning the audience will ot understand whether the ending will be good or bad. As the film is the last one so one of the most important, there are only around 10 clips from the film actually shown in the trailer taking up about 1 second each. This sees the audience start trying to piece these clips together. As the clips are so fast and exciting including explosions and fights it excite the audience and make it look like the ending will be huge.
http://youtu.be/mObK5XD8udk
Warner Bros has been hugely involved with the making and advertising of the film and this has worked well for them as it has been so successful. The Warner Bros logo has been adapted into the trailer to make it known who it came from. It also fits in well with the harry potter theme as it is dark and sinister like the film.
The trailer begins with clips from the very first harry potter film that was released and comes up with the words 'Every moment he has lived, has lead to this' which makes it even more exciting as it gets the audience thinking what has it lead to?. Clips from the previous films are shown to show just how far the film has come and increases the hype created by the audience to want to watch the film.
The music played in the background is very dark and sinister also creating suspense as to what will happen and what has the previous stories lead too.The song which is harry potters trademark seems different to normal with it being of a higher pitch and sounding like it being sung by a woman making it mysterious. You then hear Voldemort speak saying "You have fought valiantly, now join me harry and confront your fate" and then shows 5-6 clips of the film but in the space of 4 seconds which gives the audience a small insight of the film which is enough to make them start guessing and want to see the film now. They also coincide with the pace of the music becoming faster with the music changing to upbeat making it more exciting as it reveals a little more of the plot.
The clips that are shown contain alot of text and quotes which is enticing the reader and starts to get them thinking as to what is going to happen such as "the boy who lived, come to die", "Come on Tom, lets finish this were we started, together" and 'Tell them how it happened that night, how you looked him in the eye, a man who trusted you, and killed him'. All this keeps the audience guessing and creates suspense. It also sees them trying to work out who is talking in each quote.
Throughout the trailer it is dark and in a way scary meaning the audience will ot understand whether the ending will be good or bad. As the film is the last one so one of the most important, there are only around 10 clips from the film actually shown in the trailer taking up about 1 second each. This sees the audience start trying to piece these clips together. As the clips are so fast and exciting including explosions and fights it excite the audience and make it look like the ending will be huge.
http://youtu.be/mObK5XD8udk
Thursday, 1 December 2011
Vladimir Propp's Theory
Vladimir Propp’s theory was formed in the early twentieth Century. He studies Russian fairytales and discovered that in stories there were always 8 types of characters evident. These are: the hero, the villain, the donor, the dispatcher, the false hero, the helper, the princess and her father. He did not state these characters were all separate people e.g. the provider could also be the helper. There are only 8 different character types and only 31 things they ever do. Once you have identified the character type (e.g., the hero) it’s easy to guess what they will do (save the maiden, defeat the villain, marry the maiden or whatever) because each character has a SPHERE OF ACTION. This is easily relatable to films and programmes today.
Todrovs Theory
Todorov proposed a basic structure for all narratives. He said that films and programmes begin with an equilibrium (a calm period) Then agents of disruption cause disequilibrium(a period of unsettlement and disquiet). This is then followed by a renewed state of peace and harmony for the protagonists and a new equilibrium brings the chaos to an end. The simplest form of narrative (sometimes referred to as ‘Classic’ or ‘Hollywood’ narrative).
Claude Levi-Strauss theory
Claude Levi-Strauss believed that the meaning in narratives were based upon binary oppositions. He was less interested in the arrangement of the narrative and more interested in the deeper meaning of the themes.
Examples of Binary Oppositions:
Science V Nature
Girl V Boy
Man V Woman
Good V Evil
Roland Barthes Theory
Roland Barthes describes a text as
"a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds; it has no beginning; it is reversible; we gain access to it by several entrances, none of which can be authoritatively declared to be the main one; the codes it mobilizes extend as far as the eye can read, they are indeterminable...the systems of meaning can take over this absolutely plural text, but their number is never closed, based as it is on the infinity of language..." (S/Z - 1974 translation)
What he is basically saying is that a text is like a tangled ball of threads which needs unravelling so we can separate out the colours. Once we start to unravel a text, we encounter an absolute plurality of potential meanings. We can start by looking at a narrative in one way, from one viewpoint, bringing to bear one set of previous experience, and create one meaning for that text. You can continue by unravelling the narrative from a different angle, by pulling a different thread if you like, and create an entirely different meaning. And so on. An infinite number of times. If you wanted to.
Barthes wanted to - he was a semiotics professor in the 1950s and 1960s who got paid to spend all day unravelling little bits of texts and then writing about the process of doing so. All you need to know, again, very basically, is that texts may be open (ie unravelled in a lot of different ways) or closed (there is only one obvious thread to pull on).
Barthes also decided that the threads that you pull on to try and unravel meaning are called narrative codes and that they could be categorised in the following five ways:
- Action/proairetic code & enigma code
- Symbols & Signs
- Points of Cultural Reference
- Simple description/reproduction
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