Filmmaker the Art of First Impressions: How to Cut a Movie Trailer
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
filmmakermagazine.com/37093-first-impressions Filmmaker The Art of First Impressions: How to Cut a Movie Trailer by Stephen Garrett in Filmmaking, Issues, Line Items on Jan 13, 2012 Bill Cunningham New York, Enter the Void, Film Trailer, half nelson, Kinetic, Ryan Fleck, The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975, Winter 2012 It’s only two minutes long. But it’s the way a film greets the world. For a self-distributor, it can mean getting 100,000 hits on YouTube within a week. For indie filmmakers trying to make an impression, it’s a chance to have their no-budget D.I.Y. movies stand shoulder-to-shoulder with The Hobbit and Avatar 2 on iTunes. And it has a long shelf life; years after a theatrical release is over, it will be one of the first things to pop up on a Google word search. The humble movie trailer, once a delightful distraction seen only by punctual film goers exclusively in movie houses, is now the principal way most movies get exposure and remain in the public conscience. And as long as there is a computer and an Internet connection, it can be watched anytime, anywhere, indefinitely. Along with the movie poster, it is arguably the most important marketing tool available to a filmmaker. 1/12 A bad trailer won’t automatically hurt a film. Strong reviews and terrific word-of-mouth can make uninspired advertising irrelevant. Then again, not all films are bulletproof success stories. What about that promising first feature? That peculiar but compelling foreign language film? That oddball documentary with seemingly banal subject matter yet an undeniably hypnotic style? These kinds of movies can really benefit from a memorable piece of advertising. (And, oddly enough, a bad flick can occasionally make for a fantastic trailer. More on that later.) Studio films typically break down into a handful of genres: action, drama, comedy, horror, sci-fi, fantasy. They all have their conventions, and their trailers have a similarly categorized look and sound. Thick sans-serif font with jaunty music? Comedy. Elegant serif font with dour orchestral cue? Drama. These are mass-produced goods, and they are by definition formulaic. This is not necessarily criticism; there are excellent studio films that have accordingly superlative trailer work. (Trailer campaigns for huge franchises such as The Matrix, Harry Potter and Spider-Man are particularly well-crafted.) But independent and foreign language releases are usually hard to categorize. They often mix genres, subvert them or ignore them completely. Documentaries, too, can defy definition. Is it an essay film, an experiential meditation, agit-prop, social commentary or all of the above? At Kinetic, the company my partner Christy Wilson and I co-founded 10 years ago, we have had the opportunity to work on tremendous non-studio movies that aren’t the easiest to categorize; over 300 films, most recently Cary Fukunaga’s Jane Eyre, Agnieszka Holland’s In Darkness, Constance Marks’ Being Elmo: A Puppeteer’s Journey, and Tom Six’s The Human Centipede 2: Full Sequence. From a marketing point of view, the options are wide open — which can be either intimidating or liberating, depending on your point of view. GETTING STARTED So you have a movie and you need a trailer. Put very simply, a trailer is a condensed version of a feature, so it should be a collection of its greatest elements. The best way to evaluate your film is to see it first not as a genre but in terms of its fundamental characteristics. Does it have arresting dialogue? Great cinematography? Searing performances? Memorable production design? Lead with its merits. Of course genre will guide the trailer process. But which aspects are the best ones to market? If it’s a comedy/drama, do you make it funny with some gravitas, or serious with a few zingers for levity? Do you let genre define the film? Doing so might attract more ticket buyers, but could also alienate those people if the movie they see doesn’t match their presumptions. Also, if the film has played on the festival circuit, consider using laurels to tout its pedigree. Are there good reviews, and do you want to add them to the mix? Or will laurels and reviews attract only a highbrow audience and alienate the general market? Do you think the trailer would benefit from a narrator? What kind of music is available — are there cues specifically composed for the film that would be appropriate, or is outside music a possibility? Do you want a copywriter to get involved, or does the film have enough explanatory 2/12 dialogue to sustain itself? Now that you’ve unpacked your elements, decide on a creative approach. RHYTHM AND STRUCTURE Above all, and without exception, trailer editing is about rhythm. If you don’t have an innate sense of it, then your trailer will not sing. A trailer, cut well, will have a flowing motion to it, a sense that everything plays off everything else, and will propel the viewer through the experience of the film. Trailers build up excitement and anticipation, and a keen sense of rhythm heightens those sensations. While you may not choose for music to be the defining characteristic of your trailer, it still plays an important role in its basic construction. It literally sets the tone and the rhythm. I usually start every trailer by building my music bed, and that bed is generally composed of three music cues. Why three? Because trailers lend themselves to a three-act structure. Act One: Introduce the films’ characters and environment. Act Two: Complicate their world with obstacles to overcome. Act Three: Intensify the conflicts and ratchet up the tension/excitement/humor. (Montages invariably end up in Act Three.) There can be four acts, there can be one — it really just depends on the material. But three acts is a good place to start. Most importantly: never resolve anything! Whenever possible, leave questions unanswered. Don’t tie up loose ends. Keep the audience wanting more. I mentioned before that bad movies can have great trailers. That’s because trailers are about raising expectations. Films are made because a group of people really believe in the ideas behind that movie. All films start out being potentially great. By the time the filmmaking process is over, reality has intervened. Is it still great? That’s open to debate. But a trailer doesn’t reveal the whole movie. It just reveals the movie’s potential to be great. It pitches the promise of the premise. And if the trailer has seductive rhythm and an arresting structure, then any movie can look like a winner. DISASSEMBLING YOUR FILM AND CONSTRUCTING YOUR TRAILER In order to make a trailer for your film, youhave to take it apart. Every trailer editor goes through the film meticulously, breaking it down and turning it into basic building blocks. The main way to do this is to create two sequences: a dialogue string and a visual string. These are highlight reels. But they’re also like basic ingredients. Imagine taking a cake and reverse- engineering it, extracting the eggs, flour, sugar and butter. Editors are like tailors. They cut materials and shape them, letting them out here and tucking them in there, until they make a perfect fit. But editors, particularly trailer editors, are also cooks. They take their materials and they boil them down, condense them and extract their essence in order to flavor the overall meal. Common sense might suggest that the editor who cut your feature should cut your trailer, too. But in certain ways they are the least qualified. Yes, they are familiar with the footage, and trailer editors need to be, too. But feature editors are too familiar. They have lived with the 3/12 footage for months, sweated over the choices and labored to make every shot fit perfectly into the specific context of the film. Trailer editors, on the other hand, are disrespectful. They de-contextualize everything. That half-smile the heroine gives to her boyfriend that secretly devastates him? The trailer editor only sees a smile. A dog bark is a dog bark. It’s not Spot’s excited howl that saves the life of his master — it’s just a dog bark. Trailer editors have to see everything for what they are inherently, not how they function in the feature film. They have to unpack the feature in order to repack it and turn it into a trailer. There are also many familiar editing tropes in trailers: dissolves, fades from black, fades to black, white flashes with the metal-door slams, fast-paced flutter-cuts, double exposures, speed adjustments, audio rises, audio drones, audio stings. These effects are like the images from the film itself: they are tools in a toolbox. Got something lush and romantic? Use dissolves and fades. Got something fast-paced and tense? Use increasingly faster hard cuts that crescendo in a metal-door slam and a white flash. This is simplistic, but the basic message is this: Use these tools (the sound effects, the editing tricks, etc.) to tell a story. And to sell a story. STRIKING THE RIGHT TONE Certain films have subject matter that might turn off audiences who think they’ve seen that type of movie before. Myles Bender, senior vice president of creative advertising at Focus Features, was concerned that their new production of Jane Eyre would be perceived as too literary, too outdated and be viewed as a chick flick. He requested a trailer that played down the traditional romantic melodrama and emphasized something else: horror.