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5-2B: Making Movie Trailers
Introduction
Now that you have seen two trailers, let's learn about strategies for making them. In the page
elow, you will find an article discussing what makes a good trailer. Thinking about these ideas
will help you identify conventions and techniques in movie texts.
The article has five strategies for making a good trailer. Your task is to understand these
strategies and to analyze how movie trailers use them. Read the article and complete the
practice exercise.
Learning Goals
Evaluate the effectiveness of media texts.
Identify the conventions and techniques in media texts
The Article
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Top 5 Attributes of a Successful Movie Traile
Storyblocks
December 2011
With the dawning of YouTube and social media, movie trailers have a whole new importance in
the movie making industry and are looking better and better rather than as though they were
made by a high schooler in After Effects. Before, these two-minute mini movies were just
novelties to be seen before your featured film. Now, we have countdowns to the release of
trailers and special viewings once they’re available. With all the hype, it is important to realize
what makes some movie trailers epic while others tend to underwhelm. Here are the top 5
attributes of a successful movie trailer.
1. It should be humble.
I remember watching a Transformers trailer one day and it practically screamed at me, “THIS IS
THE BEST MOVIE YOU’LL EVER SEE IN YOUR LIFE!”, or something to that effect. Thank
you, obnoxiously loud trailer, but I think I should be the judge of that. Good movie trailers are
the ones that don’t need critic reviews or over stated titles to tell you the movie is good. Fo
instance, the trailer for the upcoming movie The Ho
it. This film is highly anticipated and could
easily add on quotations from practically any critic, but instead they let it speak for itself.
2. It should set up the basic premise.
All too often, trailers leave us with either too much information on the plot or not enough.
Successful trailers find that sweet spot right in between. It tells us what we can expect to
happen in the movie without giving away any crucial plot points. I think the Ha
y Potter movies
have always done a great job with this. The trailers remind us where we left off, remind us that
we’re still fighting evil, and then leave it at that.
3. Introduce some, but not all, of the main characters.
Especially if you have a star-studded cast, it is easy to get wrapped up in giving everyone face
time during the trailer. Try to focus on one or two characters that might get the audience excited
instead of bombarding them with the whole ensemble. The more you keep a surprise, the bette
eactions you will get during the movie itself. Take the latest Dark Knight trailer for instance. We
see little glimpses of good and evil, but the trailer itself doesn’t go into depth about who is who.
We’re supposed to figure that out ourselves, which makes this all the more powerful and
exciting.
4. Use awesome music.
An awesome piece of music can make or
eak a trailer. It doesn’t always have to be supe
dramatic, either. As long as the music genuinely reflects the mood of the movie, you’ll be
golden. For instance, Where the Wild Things Are featured an awesome track from Arcade Fire.
Using that band and that specific song took a movie that might have otherwise been considered
a children’s film and turned it into a trip down memory lane that any 20 something hipster would
love.
5. Capture the mood of the movie.
If you don’t capture the overall mood, then what’s the point? When cutting your trailer, focus on
emotion instead of plot points. Make the audience excited to enter whatever world you’re trying
to sell them. Pixar does a great job of this. Every year they create worlds we have never seen
efore, but their trailers make us feel like we’ve been there a dozen times and can’t wait to go
ack for another adventure.
Original Source
Practice
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log.storyblocks.com/inspiration/top-5-attributes-of-a-successful-movie-traile
Now that you have learned a few ideas about what makes a great trailer, let's put those idea
into practice. Below you can see a trailer for Suicide Squad, a 2016 action movie. Afte
watching the video, answer these questions:
Is the trailer humble? What are some specific examples that make you think yes or no?
Does it give you the basic premise of the movie? Do you think it should give more or less
plot details? Why do you think that?
Does it introduce the main characters? Does it show you too much or too little about them?
Is the music good? Why do you think that?
Does it give you an idea of the mood of the movie? What are some specific examples that
show you the mood?
Source: Suicide Squad - Official Trailer 1 [HD] - Warner Bros. Pictures
Success Criteria
Before moving on to the next section, make sure you understand the following:
I can evaluate the effectiveness of movie trailers.
I can identify techniques used in movie trailers.
COURSE MENU
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5-2C: The Blair Witch and Viral Marketing
5-2C: The Blair Witch and Viral Marketing
Introduction
The Blair Witch Project created a marketing campaign that led people to believe the movie was
eal. As a result, it became one of the highest-selling independent movies of all time. Today, it is
egarded as one of the pioneers of viral marketing and a case study in how to promote a movie.
The video and article below show how the movie company created such a success. Analyzing
their techniques will help you understand the production factors, conventions, and techniques in
the media industry. It will also give you insight into the internet marketing campaigns you see
today. Watch the video, read the article, and answer the questions at the bottom of the
page.
Learning Goals
Identify the conventions and techniques in media texts.
Explain how production factors influence the media industry.
The Video
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Source: Moments That Changed The Movies: The Blair Witch Project - Academy Originals
The Article
How the original The Blair Witch Project ushered in a new era of viral movie marketing
Rebecca Stewart
September 2016
The Drum
As Blair Witch 2016 takes to the Box Office, The Drum catches up with of one of the creators
ehind the original movie's website to find out how the film kickstarted a viral marketing trend
that has been aped by countless studios since.
"In October of 1994, three student filmmakers disappeared in the woods near Burkittsville,
Maryland, while shooting a documentary. A year later their footage was found..."
The premise of the The Blair Witch Project was a simple one, but with a $60,000 budget and
eight days of film reel its creators couldn't have begun to imagine that the movie would go on to
gross $248m worldwide.
The low-budget flick has transpired to be the fifth highest-earning independent film of all time,
ut in lieu of the finances for Hollywood-style special effects and a mammoth marketing
strategy, the directors instead relied on viral marketing (in the 1999 sense) to propagate the
myth that the story told in the movie was actually real and that the film was a documentary.
At the heart of this was a dedicated website created by the movie's distributors at Artisan
Entertainment. The site helped plant the seed that an u
an legend of an evil witch camping out
in the woods in rural Maryland was actually true long before the film's release. Dedicated pages
offered up a timeline of the "major events," in the history of the Blair Witch, background on the
supposedly missing students (Heather, Michael, and Josh) and interviews with the victims'
'families' lamenting their untimely disappearance.
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The internet as we know it was still a relatively new domain for marketers at the time, and
tasked with pulling together the pioneering site was Jessica Rovello, a fresh-faced director of
online services at Artisan. She notes that the
ief was a "dream," to work on because the
directors, Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, along with production company Haxan Films
had passed on a massive amount of creative collateral. These images and b-roll were then
digitized and uploaded on to the site to create the illusion that private photographs and news
coverage had been gathered by investigators, with fresh content being put online on a regula
asis.
From there, the concept "took on a life of its own," notes Rovello.
"When the studio acquired the movie and when the marketing team really started talking about
it we all kind of had a feeling that it was going to take off in this way and that it could be a
cultural phenomenon," she adds. "I don’t remember having an experience like that since where
you think that something is going to happen and it actually does."
She also muses that the advent of social platforms, like Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit, would
have made it much trickier for the marketers of the spinoff to pull a similar stunt. "I think
ecause the internet was still a fairly new medium that helped. If somebody tried to do it today it
would happen but it would probably be debunked so quickly that it wouldn’t have the ability to
take time to catch on."
Reports from the time have also suggested that the marketers behind the stunts drip fed
information into threads on internet forums dedicated to the 'legend' of the Blair Witch.
The online push was supported by a big offline marketing effort. The