The Critical Reflection

 The trailers for Pleasantville, USA promote the deeper themes of the actual movie in a more cryptic way (as is conventional for trailers), utilizing the conventions of the psychological thriller genre. This engages the target audience with the ideas in an entertaining way so as to promote future viewing of the film. Pleasantville, USA seeks to ask the questions of how stark the difference can be between appearance and reality, as well as to whether escape from the past is truly achievable. 

For this production, I decided that it was absolutely imperative that I use conventions. The conventions for psychological thrillers, ironically enough, lie in the unconventional - otherwise known as the supernatural or the macabre. After watching the trailer for Last Night in Soho, I decided to make lighting a key tool for my production. One of the conventions for the psychological thriller genre is to play with lighting, especially the contrast between the dark and the light. I watched a video that showed certain lighting techniques designed to either emphasize the subject that is being illuminated, or how the director and lighting team can emphasize the darkness as well, playing with proportions to show the conflict between the dark and light. I also wanted to develop a lighting motif, just as Soho did with its neon lighting. 

That lighting convention carried over to the other components of the projects. In the poster, the darkness is supposed to be engulfing the main subject, with those small lights offering a weak protest against it. The lighting technique carried over to my Instagram posts as well, as I made it a priority of mine to play around with the lighting for every single post. I had to adjust the lighting a lot manually for the majority of them.  

Moreover, I determined that the brand that I had to create for this project had to be compatible with my genre. The core of my brand is dark and introspective questioning, so I had to build aesthetics and my tone around my central themes (appearance versus reality, escaping the past). To do so, I toyed with lighting, as mentioned above, and I also employed dark and caustic humor. This can be seen through my Instagram captions and posts, especially when it came to my mascot Bones and my other behind-the-scenes shots. The Instagram accounts for Jordan Peel’s thrillers such as Us and Get Out also tend to use dark humor, so does Soho. Mine is a little more on-the-nose, but I wanted that to be a part of my brand. 

I also had to utilize my genre in order to captivate my target audience. I watched the trailer for A Quiet Place for inspiration for auditory design and conventions for thrillers. I came away with a lot of inspiration, especially in terms of the supernatural-sounding stings in order to captivate the target audience. So the thriller stings and other elements of my suspenseful sound design, paired with the lighting elements, served to engage my target audience within the trailers. I should have incorporated the horror sound elements more for the Instagram page, because the posts with that emphasis on sound design made my audience interact with the account more, especially since my target audience is typically younger (in their early 30s or 20s) and is more interested with the sound design aspect of thrillers when it comes to marketing.

However, the project did hit some snags in terms of casting and representation. The original trailers were going to have a more diverse cast of “townspeople” (aka demons), but, due \to scheduling conflicts over break and during the school week, those shots weren’t able to get filmed and there were others who had to fill in the roles. The original plan was to get the look of a homogenous suburbia through costume design and the seemingly perfect appearance of the setting, but the lack of diversity actually does strike a topic that this film explores (based on the shots filmed for the trailer, at a more surface level): the dark past behind a lot of the “utopian” suburbias in the United States. One of the original inspirations behind the setting and idea of Pleasantville, USA - besides the actual suburban town of Weston, FL - is its movie namesake Pleasantville. One thing that was very noticeable in Pleasantville was its lack of representation (its glaringly all-white and nearly homogenous cast). This was purposeful for that film, as after doing research, the entire setting was based around the actual urbanization and homogenous society of the United States during the late 1940s and 50s. That film did offer up its critique of the homogenous nature of that society (as much as it could for a comedy/fantasy), but Pleasantville, USA strives to take an even darker approach, using a more sardonic lens through the genre of psychological thriller. I researched the history of Levittown, nicknamed “America’s First Suburb”, and the racist policies that went into making it the ideal residence for the conventional white family. Many suburbs in the U.S. had similar policies, adding to racial and ethnic de facto segregation. So though not ideal, this less diverse casting adds to the tense, uncomfortably homogenous feel of the setting and adds a historical layer to the theme of appearance versus the dark reality. 

Upon reflection, after my weeks-long commitment to this project, there are some things that I look back on and know for certain that I could have improved. There were some shots that I could have taken to make the setting even more imposing (including the wide shot of the robotic demon townspeople). I think there is also too drastic a shift in tone of the first trailer. I might just have been better off jumping straight into a tense, unsettling tone after the first 30 seconds rather than taking about half of the trailer time to do so. While I do like how the trailers and the social media page turned out, I do think my poster is a little bit devoid of that sardonic and almost caustic humor that I chose to be a pillar of my brand. Even then, I definitely learned a lot working on this piece and I’m really proud of what I created.