A Laugh a Second?

So just what is a trailer, anyway?

“…Studies of audiences and trailers have been conducted, but these focus on preselected stimuli (Eastman et al, 1985;Barker and Mathijs, 2008;Davis et al, 2013), while the work that comments upon audience attitudes have little progressed beyond asides that reiterate popular criticism dating back to the earliest writing on the cinema industry (Audienscope, 1977;Kernan, 2004;Lewis, 1933). Work by Johnston (2009Johnston ( , 2013 and the output of Grainge and Johnson's (2015) Red Bee media project are helping to approach elements of this issue from an industrial perspective, while at the time of writing two ongoing studies seek to extrapolate this from the audience and industrial perspective (Greene et al, 2014;Deaville et al, 2014). In short, though Couldry's concept of textual definition through a shared understanding allows for considerations of the audience (and is arguably lurking implicitly in trailer studies that are oblique in their corpus generation), there is currently little evidence of audience attitudes to trailers to help inform such an audience led definition and the trailer remains a largely idealised theoretical entity.…”

The Soundtrack of the Sinister Trailer

“…I combine quantitative methods to analyse and visualize the soundtrack with formal analysis, looking at its large-scale structure and the structure and use of localized affective sound events, the role of dialogue, and the uses of different types of sound effects. The combination of methods makes it possible to go beyond the purely qualitative approach adopted by Deaville and Malkinson (2014), which identifies and defines the functions of relevant audio content in a trailer but tends towards a static description of a soundtrack, to provide a richer understanding of sound design in film trailers in which sound is a dynamic element of film style and where focusing on the shape of the audio envelope (attack, sustain, release, linearity v. non-linearity, etc. ) can help us to understand The Soundtrack of the Sinister Trailer not only what sounds are present and the functions they fulfil, but also how and why the soundtrack was put together.…”