Video Game trailer analysis

Dead Island 

The narrative for the Dead Island trailer seems to run in a non linear narrative but is however made up of a parallel narrative with two strands. One being the dead girl (which is reversed) and the other being of the family saving the girl, the two strands then end up meeting at the point where the girl is being left/ picked up. The start of the trailer is an enigma code , due to the girl lying on the grass as several zombies are behind her. This immediately makes the audience question why she is there and what could have happened to her? As we move further into the advert we see the typical conventions of a horror survival genre through mise en scene. Such as the extreme gore and blood that are in the reversed narrative of the girl, but also the typical look for a zombie which includes missing limbs dishevelled clothes and covered in blood dirt and vacant eyes. Zombies are often used in an allegorical way in horror/ survival genres to portray a message to the audience.

The trailer cleverly uses an emotionally manipulative piece of music in the narrative that is reversed. This may seem quite odd due to the fact that the scene is of a battle between the parents of the dead girl and a herd of zombies.  The sound in the narrative that moves forward however, is just of the breath of the girl as she is running and the sound of the zombies grunts as they are chasing her. The lack of music in this piece of narrative allows the audience to connect with the little girl and adds a sense of greater sense of panic. The advert also adds panic by cutting between the two narratives one including the emotionally manipulative music to the one that lacks any. This adds a disjointed feeling to the advert and messes with the audience state of mind. The sound effects in the narrative that moves forwards signifies the life of the girl and shows that she is still alive whereas the narrative that moves backwards does not contain this and therefore signifies that the little girl is deceased.

During the narrative that is reversed there are numerous close ups of the violence and killings of the  zombies by the father which is typical of horror/survival genre.