Requiem for a Dream

Requiem for a Dream is a 2000 American psychological drama film directed by Darren Aronofsky and starring Ellen Burstyn, Jared Leto, Jennifer Connelly, and Marlon Wayans.

The film is based on the struggles of living with different types of drug addictions. Although this film is a psychological drama it had aspects of both the social realism genre and thriller running through it. The colour motives and interesting shots used were inspiration for our trailer. 

This is perhaps the most famous shot in the film. The camera gets further and further away from the actors whilst spinning. This creates a feeling of delusion, confusion or helplessness. It quite literally makes the audience feel as if the actors 'head is spinning', in requiem for a dream this is effective as they are lost in their drug addiction and don't know what to do and I feel this shot portrays that feeling of helplessness. In our trailer a shot similar to this can be used after our antagonist has sent a video of herself stripping to portray her anxiety and vulnerability. 

Another shot that I took inspiration from was the extreme close up of the actors eye. This was used when someone had just shot heroin in the movie so you could see their eyes dilating as a result of the drug. I feel this was really effective as the shot was very intense which gave the effect of how intense the feeling of taking heroin could be. Our main protagonist has bright blue eyes so an extreme close up of his eyes would be an aesthetically pleasing shot, especially if it indicated he was watching the girl in our film trailer stripping. The extreme close up nature of the shot would make the audience almost feel uncomfortable which is something we wanted to achieve in our film trailer.

Requiem has a red colour motif running though out the film. The character of Sarah becomes obsessed with looking like she did when she was younger and fitting into the 'red dress'. We see her at several points sitting in the red dress and zipping up and eventually at the end going crazy whilst wearing the red dress. Her son Harry also has a hallucination of his girlfriend wearing the red dress. We took this as inspiration and decided to use red in our colour scheme. We want to do this as it links to the YouTube logo but it also has connotations of danger and desire, two themes that appear in our trailer.