What Makes a Good Trailer?

Recently I was watching the trailer for the new J.J. Abrams produced film 10 Cloverfield Lane. If you haven't seen it, here it is.

 While some may disagree, I think this is a really fantastic trailer. It sets up the film's tone and gives you a glimpse of what it's about without giving too much away. This got me thinking about what makes a really good movie trailer. It's important to know that a good trailer doesn't always mean a good film and a good film doesn't always have a good trailer.

I think the biggest thing those editing trailers do is focus too much on plot. You'll finish the trailer and feel like you've watched the entire movie. The editors seem to think that if you don't know the entire movie, you won't want to see it. That however, is completely the opposite of how it should be. Let's go back to the 10 Cloverfield Lane trailer.

Bad Robot loves greenish cloudy skies and a silhouette 

We open on a trio of people doing various activities to an upbeat score. However, the music starts to slow as we are shown images that this situation is less than ideal. The trailer ends with the female seeing something horrible but we of course do not know what she sees. All we are able to gather from this trailer is she is in the bunker and it's less than ideal. Everything surrounding it is left as a mystery. However, later trailers ended up showing far too much and revealing most of the mystery around the film, this one however does a great job. Bad Robot is well known for having well done trailer built around lots of mystery. Look at their trailers for Cloverfield and Super 8. However the latter did suffer from being marketed wrong. What we assumed would be another Cloverfield-esque horror film ended up being a coming up age film with a very Spielbergian feel.

Bad Robot REALLY loves greenish cloudy skies and a silhouette

Another recent film that suffered from being marketed wrong was Guillermo Del Toro's Crimson Peak. See the trailer here

The trailer makes the film look like a straight out horror film. However Del Toro was explicit in pointing out that movie was more of a "Gothic Romance". However, the trailers didn't reflect that and many people went into it expecting much more of a scare and were treated something that was absolutely beautiful, but not up to their par in the scare department.

I'll end by talking about what I think is a near perfect trailer. Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
While nearly every trailer for this film was fantastic I think this one stands out among the rest. With only eight short clips and a minor bit dialogue, the trailer perfectly captured the spirit of the film without giving any story away. Never before has a trailer satisfied me over a year before the film.

Be sure to also check out this list of trailers for great movies that are pretty awful.

The Found Footage Phenomenon

While it can be traced back to the 1980's with Cannibal Holocaust, the found footage film has proven itself to be the genre of this generation. Invigorated by the success of The Blair Witch Project and kept afloat by the likes of Cloverfield and the Paranormal Activity series, found footage has become hugely popular in the last few years, largely manifesting in the form of horror films. The low cost of production  has drawn young indie filmmakers and studio executives alike, and in a time when most people have easy access to cameras, the appeal has been widespread. However, signs of overexposure are starting to show. We're beginning to be saturated with found footage I think we've all heard the complaints and the calls for a return to traditional horror filmmaking. I know that I'm getting tired of it, so what can be done to inject some new life into the approach?

Let's start by breaking down a classic. I only just watched The Blair Witch Project for the first time a week ago and despite some skepticism going in, I was thoroughly impressed by the film. Without a doubt, it earns its reputation as the king (or is it queen?) of found footage horror and there are many reasons for this. First of all, the realism of the piece is outstanding. Unlike most films of its kind made today, a lot of care was put into making the audience buy the events as true. This is how it was sold and this is also how it functions cinematically. Video quality is grainy and the editing is choppy, stopping and picking up in the way that you would expect actual footage to be arranged. There is no omniscient camera filming the action from alternate angles- everything we see is filmed by the main characters. Nothing of the possibly paranormal forces is ever witnessed. All of the horror originates from the insinuations of creepy faraway audio and the monsters the audience imagines in the darkest corners of the screen. It's also psychological and emotionally charged by the frustrations of the characters. An immersive, strongly unsettling experience is what The Blair Witch Project is and if more contemporary found footage took its lead, the fatigue of the genre might not run so deep.

Taking a complete 180, I'm going to talk about a film I just watched the other day called Snow on tha Bluff. It's found footage, but it is horror of a very different kind. The film follows a man named Curtis Snow in his daily life in "The Bluff", an extremely poor and crime-riddled area in Atlanta. At the beginning of the film, he steals money and a camcorder from a trio of naive college students passing through the Bluff, looking to score some drugs. The stolen camcorder is our means of vision throughout the rest of the film and what it captures is uncompromisingly realistic. Although it stumbles in a few areas, Snow on tha Bluff must be praised for its incredible believability. It swerves into documentary territory on multiple occasions and I'm actually not entirely convinced that everything in the film is fabricated. Ultimately, it serves to highlight something that the vast majority of found footage films never even bother to approach: real world issues. The "stars" of the film are real people living in the Bluff and playing themselves and the film tackles subjects of fruitless crime and cyclical poverty in a very, very raw way. Now why can't more found footage work like this? If found footage in horror allows the audience to empathize with the characters experiencing the scares, then Snow on tha Bluff proves that found footage can also make the audience step into the shoes of a real person and live out their reality.

As evidenced in The Blair Witch Project, found footage horror has the ability to be realistic and frightening in the right hands and the example of Snow on tha Bluff introduces an element of social commentary and real world connections that could take the found footage to new heights. A case can be made for the genre being merely a fad, but I personally think it will be around for awhile, so let's see if we can make it better and stretch the cinematic capabilities to their limits.

Faking Reality

     This past weekend I saw the new film Apollo 18.  It was a good movie, a great idea, good acting   (crapy ending), but the most interesting thing was that throughout the entire movie, both before and after, it pretended that it was an actual collection of leaked footage from the government.  This seems to be a phenomena that has taken hold since the Blair Witch Project. Thriller movies pretending to be based on true events.

   
 This is different than a Mocumentary.  A mocumentary is a fiction film that presents itself as a documentary, they are usually a satire or a parody, and almost always comedic.  The new trend of thriller films that present themselves as fact are serious or scary. Films like Paranormal Activity and Cloverfield are filmed in such a way as to appear to be raw footage.  Apollo 18 uses this technique as well, as if the footage we are seeing was originally filmed by those in the movie.  Some films take this a little to far.  The Fourth Kind is a film about an alien abduction and the film makers made it seem as if it were real.  they even went through the trouble of have two lead actresses, one as the "Real" women in "Historical" footage, and another to be the actress playing the "real" woman in the dramatizations.  They faked news releases and created a website of facts so that if you looked into the film it would seem true.  They even went as far as to not credit the actress who played the "Real" women in the historical footage, to make her seem like a real person.
 
 This new take on thrillers is an interesting trend.  I believe that this way of marketing and presenting a story makes more people want to see it. Inside every viewer is a little part of them that wants movies to be true.  So if the film presents itself as true, it makes it more interesting and gives it an edge.  I feel that in the near future we will see many more films that are completely fictitious but present themselves as factual, simply because it sells.