Cutting Things Down to Size
Posted on November 26, 2007
Even though the possibilities in cutting a trailer from a larger project are limitless, Hollywood has taken a very uniform approach. Beyond the small selection of narrative voices, there are very few formulas a big production company is willing to use to market a multi million dollar project. This is a big opportunity for a smaller production company to break the mold and actually reach the attention of the audience.
I can’t stress how important the audience is in this process. Band leader and drummer Gene Krupa once mentioned that while he takes a solo he constantly watches the audience to make sure they are still with him. As soon as the ears begin to slip away he brings the band back in with the head. Good films take creative solos, but they don’t sacrifice character or story. A trailer is trickier because you can only tell so much in sixty seconds. It’s important to frame your plot, but the bottom line is character must survive.
It’s nice to know the creative approach has a history of working. One example is the Blair Witch Project which consisted of title cards and a single short clip from the movie coupled with a superior web presence to build hype behind the movie’s questionable historical authenticity.
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The trailer itself is not that creative, but everything it leaves out is very unusual making it a brave little teaser.
Now lets take a look at some seriously effective trailers from a notable heavy weight.
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Full Metal Jacket, Lolita, and Dr. Strangelove are three great trailers that entice you with style before content. Stanley Kubrick even maintains the flavor of his films while exploring other approaches to the subject matter. These trailers are so well managed in terms of entertainment that one wants to see the film maker’s latest work more than the film itself. More recent attempts at this are the South Park Movie, Saddest Music in the World, and the upcoming JJ Abrams’ creature feature Cloverfield.
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With emerging technologies there is no reason why we can’t do better. A few things have sprouted like the SMARTRAILER™ which is a new trailer format that Disney has been using to promote National Treasure. The basic idea is to allow the viewer to interact with the trailer, resulting in longer face time that’s sure to improve the likelihood a viewer will remember your film.
The million Euro question is whether or not the tiny attention-spans of tomorrow can handle that much work. The concept is very promising but it requires some creative thinking to circumvent the hazards of modern advertising. National Treasure scored miserably on the execution of this concept sharing only familiar short clips that range from ‘behind the scenes’ to ‘the making of,’ but if you could provide a new kind of media content that engaged the audience in an unconventional way while retaining the underlining voice of your project, you just might see Kubrick role in his grave.
Some day around the corner, someone will make such a good trailer they won’t need to even bother releasing the feature. -
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Story Board
Posted on November 21, 2007
The hardest part in revising a book is keeping perspective. In film editing we have the ability to zoom in and out of a sequence of clips (similar to google earth meets matrix for you non editors) and that gives a sense of space. There are ways to mimic this with your novel or story by using chapter summaries and even superior chapter titling can lend a hand. However, with all the tools in the world, we must constantly dig our head from the sand. This is why a good traveler brings more than one map when crossing unfamiliar territory.
Some-times changing your machine can be a helpful in dusting off your cognitive mind. I used to move book chapters to and from a type writer and a computer in order to catch myself falling into traps.
Digital collage can be a good start before putting scissors to paper, and it also serves as a great way to storyboard your shoots. Macs these days also come with a comic book creator program (and PC’s have their own available) that also serves as an amazing tool for storyboarding. If you take the time to photograph your locations from a variety of perspectives, you have the foundations for collaging all of your shots. Shoot it in neutral lighting so you can make those choices later on. For things like this it’s worth renting some kinos, but you can pull it off Macgyver style without too much creativity. Collaging the storyboard forces you to think about composition before hand and this can help direct some of your bolder camera moves.
I imagine a theater troupe could benefit even more. While shooting rehearsals in a white room, you could then move the characters within the set in Photoshop. There you can experiment with lighting sources and even prop choices. Choice of takes is another way to help the director keep on point and convey that to the actors.
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Looking at fight scenes in cinema, you’re usually hit with a barrage of perspectives. Sound design is very important, but you have to admit comic books pull it off without any more than a “WHAM!” A good fight scene in a comic book has powerful perspectives, and good comic books in generals find creative ways to integrate their panels. These are all frozen film edits, but you can transfer the basic ideas to film very easily.
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Collages & Cutting
Posted on November 21, 2007
As a film editor and a misc. artist, I find comparisons among the schools every single day. The first that comes to mind is writing and film editing in terms of pacing. Whether you are cutting a feature film or writing a short story, pacing and tempo are the two most useful tools to make your audience care about your character arc.
Lately I’ve been exploring collage on my Mac and I’m learning all sorts of things about composition in film. With the numerous ways in which you can temper colors, hue, and even the size and orientation of your subjects leads to countless possibilities within an enormous variety of perspectives.
Turns out you can use a lot of the same strokes in FCP. I’ll give some examples in another post of some useful tricks to put your Photoshop brain and your FCP brain in the same place.
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For now, take a look at the composition in some of these collages and watch some examples of film. Collage Jerks is a group of collage I manage on FLickr.
Slaying on the Green is a new themed group centralized around killing monsters on golf courses.
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