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This topic comprises 5 pages: 1 2 3 4 5
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Topic: Movies are WAY too loud!
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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."
Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001
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posted 02-06-2018 10:22 PM
quote: Brad Miller
For those interested, preshow advertising audio is collapsed all the way down to mono. Then when content that people actually give a shit about starts (the previews), they get LCR stereo. Then the feature kicks in full throttle with all channels playing. It's an old classic presentation trick sort of like "opening the curtains", but with the sound.
These days I think that is a perfect way to handle it. There's nothing special about modern movie trailers. It's just like web sites cranked out via WordPress: nothing creative. It's the same edits, whoosh sound effects and other clip-art bullshit. The marketing department probably made 20 variations of it. In the off chance I buy a new movie on Blu-ray disc I really don't care if the trailers, TV spots, etc are missing.
I guess it was around the early to mid 1990's when movie trailers started bundling in 5.1 channel digital audio mixes. And years prior to that some trailers included with 70mm shows featured 6-track mixes.
Way back then such trailers had a novelty to them since most trailers were just stereo or mono. I would still love to watch a 70mm version of that Total Recall teaser trailer again (no proper 5.1 mix of it has ever been done on DVD or Blu-ray). The times I saw it, attached to 70mm shows in Manhattan theaters, late 1989 & early 1990 there wasn't a half hour of TV commercials and trailers to slog through before the feature. IIRC, when I watched Glory in 70mm that Total Recall teaser was the only thing that played before the movie started.
I remember being blown away by teaser trailers for Twister and Independence Day. One of the trailers for Fellowship of the Ring was really awesome. But by the time the LOTR movies were hitting theaters trailer volume versus feature volume was ridiculous.
Since then movie trailers have committed all kinds of other serious sins, the chief one being spoiling the damned movie. So if I'm really interested in a certain movie I'll try to avoid watching trailers in advance. These days it's very easy to see any new movie trailer online, even with digital surround sound. Sites like The Digital Theater will let you download copies of them in multiple surround sound formats. Download it and crank it on your home rig. If a commercial movie theater tones it down during the pre-show you're not missing anything.
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Marcel Birgelen
Film God
Posts: 3357
From: Maastricht, Limburg, Netherlands
Registered: Feb 2012
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posted 02-07-2018 03:02 PM
quote: Bobby Henderson
These days I think that is a perfect way to handle it. There's nothing special about modern movie trailers. It's just like web sites cranked out via WordPress: nothing creative. It's the same edits, whoosh sound effects and other clip-art bullshit. The marketing department probably made 20 variations of it. In the off chance I buy a new movie on Blu-ray disc I really don't care if the trailers, TV spots, etc are missing.
If you look at old trailers, then I'm not so sure if the bar was really so much higher for a whole lot of them back then. You simply tend to forget all the shitty ones. ![[Wink]](wink.gif)
The structure of the average trailer has most definitely changed and there are way too many trailers out there that outright spoil a movie, by exposing essential plot lines and even twists.
Making a really good trailer is an art in itself. There have been lots of bad trailers for good movies. I think a trailer should expose as little information as possible about the actual plot, but still try to capture the 'mood' of the movie.
I still remember this teaser for Spielberg's 2005 version of War of the Worlds.
Though the movie itself was probably only mediocre, the teaser, which featured almost exclusive content not in the final cut of the movie, I consider this to be one of the better teasers/trailers made until today.
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Mike Blakesley
Film God
Posts: 12767
From: Forsyth, Montana
Registered: Jun 99
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posted 02-07-2018 05:36 PM
The other bad trend in trailers is the lightning-fast pace of the cuts. You can't even begin to take a scene in before it's off to the next scene. Last time I went to CinemaCon, the trailers were pretty much a blur by the second day, so I developed a little game of counting the seconds before a cut. It was very rare to get to more than 2 seconds.
On the subject of trailers spoiling the movie, when the remake of "Carrie" came out a few years ago, I was irritated because I thought the trailer gave away too many of the movie's surprises. So I looked at the trailer from the original movie in 1976, and it pretty much had all the same spoilers in it, so maybe things haven't changed all that much.
Some of my favorite trailers:
"Oh God!" - It was just George Burns' voice over a blank screen. "Hello, it's me, God. Yeah, God! I decided to come down and make a movie."
"Twister" mentioned by Bobby - it was about 85% black screen. I don't like to play the trailers loud but that one was really effective if played loud.
"Independence Day" - For this one I put a cue on the film to make the lights go to "dark" when the alien ship first arrived on the scene. It was really effective. Too bad I hated the actual movie. (Well the last third of it, at least.)
"Star Wars - A New Hope" from the late '90s reissue. It started off showing a small TV in the middle of the screen, with James Earl Jones narrating, "For an entire generation, people have experienced Star Wars this way...on the TV screen. But if you've only seen it this way, you haven't seen it at all." Then the Millenium Falcon flew out of the TV and filled the screen, with sound exploding into all the surrounds.
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