Codes and conventions of Action Trailers

Codes and conventions

Action Trailers

• 12/15 certificate, maximising youth audiences
• Often hybridised with Sci Fi/Adventure/Romance
• Major Hollywood studio produced and distributed
• High production values including CGI FX. Fast paced editing
• Classic Hollywood 3 act narrative structure
• Predictable chain of events – cause and effect
• Single stranded, linear, closed narrative
• Dramatic non-diegetic sound
• More narrative action codes than enigma codes
• Star Marketing: Audience identification/expectations (Cruise/Pitt/Willis/Thurman/Jolie/Stallone/Craig/Schwarzenegge/Di Caprio)
• Romantic sub-plot, Humorous dialogue
• Relationships with new technology (youth audiences)
• Use of close up/Insert shots/High Key Lighting
• Dominant representation of gender: male/female action hero. Mulvey’s male gaze and contemporary female gaze can apply
• Russian theorist, Tzvetan Todorov, suggests that all narratives follow a three part structure. They begin with equilibrium, where everything is balanced, progress as something comes along to disrupt that equilibrium, and finally reach a resolution, when equilibrium is restored.
• Offer only brief glimpses of the most impressive CGI set pieces, accompanied by a quick fade-out 
• Single words written massively across the screen are more impactful than whole sentences, so tagline is broken up into its component parts and sprinkled throughout the trailer
• A brief pause for thought just before the climax and often one of the characters say something witty
• Assembling fake news footage into a glitchy, distorted montage, and sure to include words like "epidemic", "catastrophic" and "unexplained"

Checklist:

- guns

- girls

- car chases

- low key lighting

- good vs bad (protagonist vs antagonist)

- pulses of music

- dramatic pause

- romantic sub-plot/ humourous dialogue