DIY-ing Your Film’s Trailer: Do’s and Dont’s for Filmmakers
In the new digital film age and the world of DIY marketing and distribution, we film makers will no longer be handing our dailies off to a marketing agency to cut us the dream trailer. While in the writing, shooting and editing stages, we must think as artists; but after that period, we must become marketing gurus. Check out this entertaining article from Film.com on marketing your film appropriately, starting with the trailer:
Good Trailers vs. Bad Trailers: Where Movie Marketers Go Wrong
Don’t ruin all the good jokes, don’t tell us the entire plot, and whatever you do, don’t spoil the ending!
MaryAnn Johanson, Jun 16, 2009
I feel like Gollum and the One Ring when it comes to film trailers: I loveses them and I hateses them. I’m always eager for a look at the movies I’ll be seeing in a few months, but I’m always terrified that the trailers will ruin the experience of watching those movies. One of the first things I learned as a film critic was how much more enjoyable it is to see a movie with no preconceptions whatsoever about it, and more than once I’ve seen a trailer for the first time after I saw the movie and knew to a certainty that if I’d seen the trailer first, it would have greatly lessened my enjoyment of that movie.
Movie fans know why: Because trailers give away far too much. All the best jokes. (That’s such a standard that when the jokes in the trailer are terrible, it’s a guarantee that the movie will be awful, because if those are the best attempts at humor the film can make … so maybe even bad trailers do offer a valuable service in this respect.) The resolution of the sexual tension between the protagonists. The most surprising of the plot twists. And often, the ending of the film itself … or hints enough that you can guess.
So why bother even seeing the movie at all? Continue reading →