Yes, I Know I Make a Lot of Dramas

My usual way of creating a film-based project is starting with a genre. Last year, I expressed that my favorite and choice genre is drama. Saying that off of the bat makes it easy for me to seem like a basic, teenage girl who only watches werewolf love stories (which I am, but only part-time). Though,  I believe that there is true value in the genre of drama; with the intent of emotionally affecting audiences, dramas must be able to connect to them in a very deep way. Dramas have multi-faceted characters, who you love to hate and hate to love. The most common misconception of dramas (that I have encountered, at least) is that people assume dramas to just be romance-based, like The Titanic or The Notebook. Love does exist within the genre of drama but it's not just one type of love; dramas explore love within families, friends, communities, romantic relationship, and self.

Working with dramas for many years I have complied a short list of conventions that I deem crucial to create a good drama:

• Realistic characters and relationships 
• Clearly defined locations
• Involves major conflict involving main character(s)
• Pivots around the "equilibrium" (i.e. how the conflict throws off the equilibrium, and the attempts to get it back)

Okay so now that I went on a rant let me get to the actual point of this post. Since I began with my narrative rather than a genre, I had to invert my process a bit. I researched historical fiction, but my priest adventure didn't quite fit in. After searching for the perfect genre, I resulted back to my good ol' pal, Drama. With deep, character-driven dialogue, conflict, and love my narrative is very much so a drama (I swear this was an accident I guess I just naturally make dramas, oops), I then looked into the conventions of drama trailers so I could create my own trailers in the best possible way. Some conventions include:

• Range between 1.5-2.5 minutes
• Non-diegetic background music and stings to convey desired tone
• Shift from upbeat asynchronous background music to dramatic, emotional music as the major conflict is introduced
• Use either voice-over or dialogue to provide context
• Textual graphics 
• The scenes included include themes of despair and/or anger
• The main character(s)'s conflict is hinted out 

My plan is to implement typical conventions in one trailer, which will act as the universal trailer. By using conventions, it will resonate well with audiences because they are familiar with those types of drama trailers. Though, for the second trailer, I want to stray from the norms and make something more artsy, like the Moonlight trailer, as I mentioned in my previous post. This trailer will be aimed at a smaller, niche audience. I believe that the duality of trailers will strengthen the marketing campaign by appealing to both holistic and specific target audiences.