Indy Trailers with no context

Jon Starr

Jon Starr

Veteran
One thing I've been noticing as a trend with indy films is that they put together a trailer, but it's often a trailer of shots (with no context), randomly put together, with little dialogue, and if there is dialogue it's without any context. Often there's no text, voice over, anything...

I'm not sure I understand this approach to making a trailer. It tells me nothing of the film, and I'm just left confused. It's as if it's made for themselves, for their family, or people that already know about the film. However for me a trailer is designed to tell new people about a film, and get people interested in it. It's like a commercial, or rather it IS a commercial, for your film.

The only reason I could see for the no story approach is they believe they can get people interested in the film via the cinematography and maybe some actions. However this has never worked for me. Every time I see these trailers I have no interest whatsoever in the film.
 
Definitely from people who cut their own trailer. I get work like this all the time, where the distributor wants me to cut a new trailer, as the filmmakers trailer is usually exactly as you described. On the flipside, distributors often want to reveal too much and kill any mystery.
 
Yes there is a flipside, but a balance can be found. Showing nothing in the trailer is certainly not the way to go. It's not black and white.

I wonder if that's the reason? They don't want to reveal too much? In my opinion if by 'not revealing too much' means you have to say nothing about the story, then there's something wrong with the story.
 
Jon Starr said:
I wonder if that's the reason? They don't want to reveal too much? In my opinion if by 'not revealing too much' means you have to say nothing about the story, then there's something wrong with the story.
Click to expand...

Cutting trailers requires skill not just in editing, but in sound design, title design, writing, recording voice-over if necessary. Filmmakers usually don't have all those skills. Creating a montage of shots cut to a single track of music without dialogue is easy for anyone to pull off fairly well, which is probably why you see a lot of them.
 
Major releases can also have really bad trailers:

http://www.highdefdigest.com/blog/roundtable-movie-trailers/

I really liked the movie Kick Ass and I'm happy they finally decided to do a sequel. IMO, one of the reasons it did poorly at the box office was the trailer which made it look like a PG13 comedy. People were appalled when they saw the movie and 14 year old Chloe Marantz is cussing like a sailor. It's a really dark and twisted movie and the trailer went in a totally opposite direction.

Now this is how you do a trailer:

 
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What's wrong with the star wars trailer? It tells you exactly what it is about, promises (and shows) action the likes of which you've never seen before. The only fail is not using the film's score for the music. Bear in mind this is 1977. The high impact in and out trailers of today didn't exist. This trailer is promising something that the audience of 1977 has never seen before. I don't recall seeing this version of the trailer before but watching it makes me want to watch the movie now (if only Disney would release the theatrical cut). Job done.
 
Trailers more than often don't have a film's score. Often because the score isn't finished yet. I know there was one original trailer for RoboCop that had the Terminator score in it for example.
Then there are those trailer pieces that become trendy, like the score for Dragon the Bruce Lee Story, which was in almost every trailer for a while, or the Sunshine score.
Nowadays every trailer has a piece of the Inception score in it.
 
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