Trailer research 02

Yesterday I went to the Oxford BarCamp, and I'm sorely tempted to write something about that, however I've neglected the set curriculum for too long. On Friday, me and Jonny sat in the Media room discussing Kinect and watching more trailers, I decided to boil them down to their most basic components:
Name of publisher, distributor or production company. (4-6 seconds)
Name of director or main actor. (2-4 seconds)
Date of release. (4-7 seconds)
Introduction to setting, including an establishing shot. (10-20 seconds)
A single shot designed to linger in the audience's memory. (2-5 seconds)

The major difference I can identify between the trailer task and the film opening task is that a trailer is not supposed to cram as much story as possible into the sequence. It's also perfectly acceptable to break normal cinematic practice and show almost random unrelated scenes together in one long montage. A trailer doesn't need to make any sense, it just has to give the audience a quick preview of the film.
When I mention a single shot which symbolises the film for the audience, it applies to all genres. For example in a horror trailer there's the close-up of a scared face, an action trailer generally uses the most impressive action sequence, meanwhile a romantic trailer uses a kiss, a comedy film uses one of the film's visual gags. In short a film can incorporate a motif of it's genre into the trailer to identify itself.

All these are just conventions and are frequently challenged.

I'm also aware that trailers are made after or during a film's creation. Those making trailers have a full film to rely upon, with an established narrative imposed upon them. I'm not naive enough to know that some shots are given higher priority in films so that they can be used in the trailer afterwards. Not having a film to follow is both a blessing and a curse in that we're more free but we don't have a pre-existing setting to work with. If it becomes necessary we might be forced to script a very vague over-arching narrative for an entire film, even if we'd only then include small chapters of it.

None of this was really necessary for the film opening task because we only had to set up the beginning of a narrative and there was no need to carry it through to it's end.

Before I go, I recommend watching the first episode of Pioneer One. It's not 'good' in that it couldn't be compared with, say, Firefly (which I haven't watched). But it is definitely worth studying, it couldn't rely on a hollywood budget so it makes the audience use their imagination. The director uses as much visual trickery as possible, and the action is implied when it cannot be recreated on screen.
Plus it's pirate video, independent and creative.