I think my media product both uses conventions for a thriller teaser trailer and challenges them equally.
For example, in relation to the Requiem for a Dream trailer my teaser trailer appears fairly conventional. I adopted in a sense the use of 'hip-hop' montages that director Aronosky uses in both the trailer and the actual film, where lots of short consecutive shots are combined to get across a feeling of chaos or energy.
In my trailer, I think this comes across as fear, or panic perhaps, as the 'fight' between the two alter ego's are reflected onscreen with quick flicks between each representation, whether it be Dan in the woods or the suited Dan smirking.
However, this style of editing is quite atypical. Many of the other trailers I looked at, such a Fight Club and The Butterfly Effect, follow more mainstream formulas for trailers such as having a voice over to narrate the events onscreen. I think to have a voice over in my own trailer might have distracted from the feel I was trying to convey of being lost and detached.
A film like Fight Club is from a single characters perspective, and so the narration is directed in such a way to feel more personal to the viewer.
You can see this in the use of the main character as the narrator, not only in the trailer but in the film as well (reflective of the book, which is told in the first person). To create an objective and detached narrative, such as Aronofsky did with Requiem, it's better to have no voice over because then you do not get a singular perspective on the plot. Whilst Aronofsky did use a mixture of dialogue from the film written information (such as "Adapted from the novel..." etc), I chose only to have text.
I did this because I think to achieve a good quality of sound would have been hard, and it would have been difficult to follow the quick shots and listen to what someone was saying at the same time, and let alone the effort it would have been to narrate it in the first place at such a speed.
So, in this way, I was conventional in that I took a convention used by Aronofsky and did something similar, but was also unconventional in relation to more mainstream ideals like those used by Fight Club (despite it now being considered a cult film).
Other conventions I kept to were obvious thriller trailer ones, like the ones I mentioned in this post a while ago:
http://amyloulynch.blogspot.com/2009/10/teaser-trailers.html
I mostly kept to all of them, such as the time limit, the surrealist plotline and little footage from what would be in the actual film. Ones I missed were perhaps the ones about CGI, which was limited by budget and equipment (and skill, aha), and footage that was obviously sped up.
Similarly, I don't actually know any major stars that could have appeared in my trailer, so in a way I sort of broke that convention. The Butterfly Effect has Ashton Kutcher and Amy Smart, Fight Club has Edward Norton, Helena Bonham Carter and Brad Pitt, Requiem for a Dream has Jared Leto and Ellen Burstyn...
So in my trailer I made use of my friend Dan, and made as if my film would be pushed on the independent circuit. Few big blockbusters now have a completely unknown cast or director anyway, because Western audiences have become accustomed to going to see a film based around who is in it or who directed it.
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