Cloverfield (2008) Trailer Analysis

Name of Film: Cloverfield
Year Released: 2008
Genre of Trailer: Action/ Sci-Fi/ Thriller
My Mark after viewing: 8/10

This seems to be a point of view experience of a group of people who lived in Central Park. A creature is destroying the city, creating mass destruction, but no-one seems to know what it is.

There were many good aspects to this trailer that I thought were very successful. The pace of the trailer was very well done, it went from slow to quick often using collision cutting which makes the slow editing build tension and suspense, creating intrigue making the quick editing more effective making the audience feel as heightened sense of panic. This was helped further by the good positioning of the inter-titles again helping the pace and flow of the trailer. Although this trailer was 2 minutes 11 seconds long it didn't seem that long, it draws the audience so well that it doesn't seem long at all, which means that not too much story line was given away just enough to create intrigue but not enough that you wouldn't want to go see it. The hand-held camera effects as well as the sound FX to go with it were very well done, they used to scratchiness of the camera and the loss of quality to their advantage it allowed them to use broken film effects to stitch parts of the trailer together, allowing for you to get really into the characters shoes with the point of view hand-held shots.

On the other hand, there were some points that I thought were unsuccessful. Doing a scene trailer is risky because it has to be a very good scene to allow the audience to keep interested and entice them into go seeing the film. In addition, this doesn't really sell the horror twist that this film has, it does not contain enough horror conventions for you to think that it is a horror other than editing and cinematography techniques. The dual scenes also make it a little difficult to follow, you have to work out what is going on, and the contrast between the two makes this harder.

The average score from the class was 8/10 as the editing was very well done, the collision cutting created a great effect making the audience get sucked into the trailer and the bridges between shots were very well done to tie in with the hand-held effect.