Film Trailer and Poster Analysis

This is the trailer for the 2012 film, 'The Perks of Being a Wallflower'. One of the key conventions

of this trailer is the age rating right at the beginning. I think this would attract a potential audience because children who are younger than the age restriction would want to watch it. Another key convention is the institution logo, also at the beginning. A way this could attract an audience is because there are going to be other films made by Summit of similar genres so if people know this, and are fans of a particular genre by Summit, they will be intrigued and encouraged to watch this film. Another convention I found was fast paced editing and I think this would attract an audience because there are certain clips from the film in the trailer that a lot of people would want to continue watching, wanting to know what happens in the rest of that scene. This can be quite frustrating, so then they are led to watch the film. Another convention I noticed was the voice-over at the beginning and the end of the trailer, introducing us to the character, with text of the same context during the trailer. This helps to attract an audience because it lets them get to know the main character/s and feel emotion for him/them e.g. sympathy, happiness, anger etc and would lead to people going to see it so they know what happens to the characters at the end.

This is the poster for the 2012 film 'The Perks of Being a Wallflower'. The most obvious key convention I can see is the central image, which is the three main characters (Charlie, centre, Sam, left and Patrick, right), and almost immediately you can tell what kind of people they are. From Sam's (Emma Watson) demeanor, we can see that she is quite warm and quite friendly. We can see from Charlie's (Logan Lerman) facial expression that he is a bit shy and a bit insecure, a very different character to Sam. Finally, Patrick clearly has his arms folded, the kind of demeanor of someone who doesn't care what the world says and he is quite a confident person. These are all very different personalities and I think that they would attract a potential audience because young people (who this film is aimed at and about) would be able to relate to at least one of them, and so would want to go and see the film and see what happens to that character and get to know them better.

Another key convention that I noticed is the production blurb at the bottom. I think this would attract an audience because if the audience don't know any of the three actors at the top, they can skim through the production blurb to see if there are any actors that they might be interested to go and see.

Another convention on this poster is the tagline 'We are Infinite' and this is also used at the end of the trailer. I think this could attract an audience because they would want to find out the depth of the tagline and see what it actually means.