Trailers!

Update: The trailer!

We always begin with the following disclaimer: It is impossible for you to know less about filmmaking than what we knew when we began the Salted Christmas journey. This series of articles is not designed to teach anyone in the industry anything. The series is simply intended to share with our friends some of what we’ve learned about the art, the skill, and the business of filmmaking.

Now that the film is finally complete (we thought we’d never get here), the time has arrived to create a trailer. It turns out this is much more difficult than we ever expected and there are entire businesses in Los Angeles completely devoted to the production of world class trailers. First, what is a trailer and what is its purpose?

From Wikipedia: “A trailer (also known as a preview or coming attraction) is an advertisement or a commercial for a feature film that will be exhibited in the future at a cinema, the result of creative and technical work. The term “trailer” comes from their having originally been shown at the end of a feature film screening.” Just as a well-written essay invariably employs a literary device at the beginning called an hook to capture the audience, similarly films employ a separate, extremely short version of the film to interest the audience. Usually, modern trailers consume no more than 2.5 minutes. Shorter versions of the main trailer are frequently released and are usually 1.25 minutes or so in length.

So the idea is to build interest in the film by releasing (well in advance) a short version of the film. Should be easy, right? WRONG! As we’ve begun the process of trying to create a trailer, we’ve done what we always do: look to examples that we think work well. As we review these examples, we quickly discover that an modern, effective trailer requires an incredible amount of video and audio editing. In one example we reviewed, a 2.5 minutes trailer included 100 different video clips, many specialized audio effects, music, and transitionary slides. Really impressive!

So a project we hoped would be a quick, final effort will consume considerably more time an energy than we expected. Oh, well, we live and learn. Fortunately, we recently saw a wonderful trailer online which we like so much we were moved to contact the creator. He lives in New Zealand and turned out to be a wonderful guy who does this for hire! So once again we are employing the services of a talented professional in the production of the trailer. He is currently producing a trailer and we are simultaneously producing a completely different trailer and we’ll see what happens at the end.

The goal is to have a finalized trailer of at least 2 minutes and a teaser-trailer of about 1.25 minutes by January 15. We look forward to sharing them with you. #SaltedChristmas