Looking at Genre; Romantic Comedy

As a starting point, Wikipedia.org describes a romantic comedy as

"films with light-hearted, humorous plot lines, centered on romantic ideals such as a true love able to surmount most obstacles"

Using this description as basis, the codes and conventions of the genre were looked into. This was constructed by watching trailers of romantic comedy films such as The Last Kiss, Mannequin, Bridget Jones, The Holiday, Pretty in Pink, Hitch, Notting Hill etc.

Codes and Conventions of Romantic Comedy Film Trailers/Teaser Trailers

• Non diegetic music dims or is non existent when a comic line is said
• Popular/well known non diegetic music is used throughout the trailer
• Actors names are mentioned or are written on screen
• Directors previous films are mentioned
• Homogenous font used throughout
• Famous male cinema narrative voice briefly describes the plot and characters
• Frequent use of mid shots and close up of characters

However while searching for romantic comedy trailers on YouTube.com, I found it was hard to find teaser trailers. This may be because this genre's narrative is usually quite predictable as well as having already famous actors as the hook for the audience to the film.

Let the coursework begin ...

The Brief

For our A2 media studies coursework, we must work as a group to create a teaser trailer for a film we have made up ourselves. As well as this, we must also create a poster for the film and design either the homepage for it's own website or a magazine cover featuring the film itself.

Teaser Trailers

After searching various websites and looking at examples of the type of trailer on YouTube, we came up with our own definition;

A teaser trailer is a trailer which is short in length (30 to 60 seconds) and is usually shown a long time before the actual film is released. It is produced to create hype within the audience and should contain little if no narrative so that the plot is not given away. Its purpose is to let the audience know that the film is coming.

Codes and Conventions of Teaser Trailers

• Short in length
• Contains little footage from the film
• usually a shortened version of the theatrical trailer
• released long in advance of the film
• creates hype
• footage used may have been cut out of the film
• should contain narrative enigmas to attract the audience.

While planning, filming and editing our own teaser trailer, we aim to stick to these codes and conventions as best as we can in order to make the final piece a success .