Focused Analysis of Characters; Twilight Teaser Trailer



This video is good to look at for the focused analysis of characters because it has lots of characters in it, with various levels of importance as well as status' of innocence, good and evil.

We are shown who is the innocent character by her stance, the way she moves and the actions she makes throughout the trailer, everything she does are normal, everyday actions which the audience can picture themselves doing. Her clothing is normal and she is a normal girl. This is good for attracting the target audience as they can relate to her. She is very girl-next-door and this works well in supernatural films like this as the audience can put themselves in her position and feel like this could happen to them, they can imagine themselves in her place.

Cleverly, they have dressed the good-powerful character in normal clothes too. They have used a good looking male as this would also attract their main target audience which is dominantly teenage girls. However by his stance and actions we can tell that he is not 'normal'. Certain shoots confirm this, like when he pulls up the tree- showing great strength and running up the tree trunk.

However, we can tell the evil male is infact evil, even though he doesn't have anything obvious to tell us this. He, like the others, is dressed normally (jeans and no top) but his status is shown to us through other means. He jumps into the shot and when he lands he is in a half crouched position- this shows the fact that he is trying to intimidate and creates the image of preditor vs. prey. Also by using the code of expression we can see that he is very pleased with himself and 'smug', this along with his stance emphasises that he feels he is better than whoever he is with and thinks that he has the 'upper hand' in the situation. By the way he is domineering and we never even see the character he is looking at we can tell he is evil.

By showing us the 'good' characters first, we know that these two (the male and female) are going to play a large part in the film- possibly even the largest. In showing us the 'evil' character second, we know he is going to play a large part to the story line but possibly not as big as the two 'good' characters.

In introducing the 'good' an 'evil' characters to us in the trailer it allowed them to use Tzvetan Todorov's theory of equilibrium, disequilibrium, equilibrium. However because it is a trailer they cannot show the restoration of the equilibrium as this would make it a short film and not a trailer. As well as this it would detract people from wanting to see it because the idea is that they want to see how the film ends. Leaving it at a point where everything is chaotic and unsolved makes the audience want to go and see the film to see how it all gets solved. If you restore the equilibrium at the end there would be no point in the audience going to see the film and the film would fail.