Visual Arguments in Sex and the City and 27 Dresses Trailers

The trailers for Sex and the City and 27 Dresses both are targeted towards a female audience. The films were shot in bright lighting and the colors give off a light and fun feeling. The viewer knows they will be having a good time at the movie. The Sex and the City preview follows the four women everyone knows best: Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda. The trailer opens up with Carrie getting ready for her wedding to Big. The happy-go-lucky tone slowly fades when the viewer discovers the wedding didn’t happen. The preview enters into a more serious timeframe when all four of the main characters are dealing with their problems. Similarly, 27 Dresses opens on the main character trying on a wedding dress. It appears that her life is perfect until the viewer discovers that she is not the bride but a bridesmaid. The trailer then moves into the heroine’s problems with her sister and her boss. Both trailers also use upbeat music. Sex and the City has a soft music throughout the trailer that fades into the familiar Sex and the City theme song while 27 Dresses makes use of popular music of the time that people will recognize. The creators of both trailers are intended for these movies to appeal to mostly women and maybe a few men dragged to the theater by their significant other. To appeal to this large female audience, the 27 Dresses trailer uses a more feminine font and both trailers make use of pink in at least a part of the text that appears on screen. Both trailers appeal to the traditional female ideals of love, friendship and marriage. The creators use that to their advantage while sculpting these trailers appeal to the female emotions. In both trailers the viewer feels empathy for the main characters and follows them trough the ups and downs in the trailer. In 27 Dresses the viewer feels the pain of the woman who has to plan a wedding for the man she is in love with. But the viewer also feels a sense of hope at the possibility that she could find love for herself and have a wedding of her own. The Sex in the City trailer has the same empathy for the four main women that the movie centers, however the creators also use nostalgia to get the viewer involved in the plot. The trailer does not take any time to introduce the characters; it starts off almost exactly where the television show ended. The intended viewer for this movie already knows and loves the characters in the trailer and will follow them wherever they may go. At the end of both trailers they use name recognition. The names of the actors flash on the screen, mostly in pink lettering, and give the viewer a feeling of familiarity. These visual texts do their job and ultimately encourage the viewer to go see the film, in its entirety, in theaters.