Genre Codes and Conventions Research- Black Swan

Black Swan:
Black Swan is a 2010 American pyschological thriller film, it is directed by Darren Aronofsky, and it stars Natalie Portman, vincent Cassel and Mila Kunis. The plot is based around a production of Tchaikovsky's  Swan Lake ballet by a prestigious New York City company. The ballerina has two sides to her, an innocent White Swan and the sensual Black Swan. One of the ballerinas which is Nina fits perfectley for the white swan part, while Lily the other dancer matches the black swan role. when they both compete- Nina finds a dark side to herself
Codes & Conventions:
The music isnt the first thing you notice when watching this trailer becuase at the start of the trailer there is also a voice over the music. It starts of very mellow and as the trailer proceeds it gets more intense and loud, the amount of instruments used also increases throughout the trailer. Although its not an element that is the main focus it plays a part in setting a mood and tone for the trailer, when its more mellow it connotes mystery and suspence whereas when its more louder and in-depth it signifies panic and horror. The trailer begins in a dark room, because it is dark it links in with the genre as the dark is associated with negatives and danger.

Psychological Thriller...

A psychological thriller is a specific sub-genre of the more wider range of thriller and horror genres, this genre includes elements of mystery and suspence. As it is a psychological thriller our trailer will incorprate the processes of the mind of someone who suffers from a mental disorder. We want our trailer to be unique as well as original and although it will include elements of mystery it should also have a strong structure and a logical coherence.

An example of psychological thriller genre films are;

                                                                                                                                                

These movies are all under the psychological thriller sub-genre, watching the trailer to these movies I noticed that they all included simular conventions, the music starts of slow and as the trailers progress the tempo gets more upbeat and fast paced. This works very well with a psychological thriller becuase it adds mystery and suspence to the trailer and sets a tone on what the movie will be like.

For the ancillary task we are going to make a poster for our trailer, looking at posters of psychological thrillers the majority of them use dark colours as backgrounds and then quite bold writing for the title, when making our poster for the ancillary task I think using a dark background will work very well becuase It will look really effective and also relate to our psychological thriller genre.

References-

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/psychological+thriller - Accessed on 18/09/2011

So.,what have you got in mind..?

We've come together and decided that we want to create a psychological thriller genre trailer, this is becuase we think that we can create something quite interesting, different and original using this genre as a basis.

As its a thriller genre we will be including elements of mystery and suspence, however, although we will be including these elements we dont want the trailer to be so mysterious that it doesnt have a logical coherence therefore we will make the trailer so it has a strong formation and strucure as well as mystery and suspence.

My Group...

The groups have now been decided , and our group consists of the following people:

Nasema Khanum (ME!)
Matthew Cartwright
Ryan Knight

Groups...

At the moment the groups for the main task havn't been chosen yet, we will be choosing our groups within the next few days, will keep you posted!!