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This topic comprises 6 pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6
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Topic: my trailer for Desperado
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Mike Schindler
Phenomenal Film Handler
Posts: 1039
From: Oak Park, IL, USA
Registered: Jun 2002
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posted 04-12-2007 03:02 AM
quote: Bobby Henderson
you're farting around with someone else's creative work and doing so without any kind of purpose. It's essentially creative masturbation without actually being creative.
The purpose is to develop certain skills or techniques which can be used on other works. How is it not being creative? Was the original trailer cutter or poster designer not being creative?
quote: Bobby Henderson
Actual movie trailers are advertising tools. Even though some are kind of cool, they really are nothing more than that.
And actual movies are money-making tools. Who cares? That doesn't mean they can't be good.
quote: Bobby Henderson
When you really break down things, most movie trailers are sadly lame.
All the more reason for someone like Mark to say, "Hey. I could do something better. Let me try that."
quote: Bobby Henderson
If you're going to invest hours of time in that sort of thing, at least give the viewer some legitimate reason for looking at it.
I've made a lot of movies over the years, and I wouldn't dare show them to anyone, because they all suck. But each one is better than the last, and some day, I might make a good movie. The amateur filmmakers I know don't make movies to show people. They do it for the process.
quote: Tim Reed
A scene and a trailer are two entirely different things.
Right. Both exercise different creative muscles and show off different talents. There's a lot be learned by cutting trailers. Stripping a story down to its essentials, working within very precise time constraints, quickly grabbing the audience's attention, telling a story using non-linear techiniques, etc.. Cutting trailers can be a great way to try out new ideas and then apply those ideas to something that does matter.
quote: Tim Reed
Therefore, if given the choice of working from a DVD of a movie for no reason at all, or a student film... I'd take the STUDENT FILM. There are many more opportunities to be substantively creative in that arena. It can be a challenge to make something coherent, unique, and/or emotionally moving out of all the daily footage, and tremendously satisfying after doing so.
Tim, I don't know what student films you've been cutting, but the one's I've cut leave very little room for creativity. Most are so poorly shot that cutting them is nothing more than a laborious process of assembling footage into something semi-coherent. And while you're right that it's a challenge to do so, that's not what most editors want to do.
When you have the footage you need to do whatever it is you're trying to accomplish, whether that's a scene or a trailer or something else, it frees you up to make creative choices instead of creative solutions. And that's why I would much rather cut a trailer for a pre-existing good movie than cut a student film.
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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."
Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001
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posted 04-13-2007 06:26 PM
quote: Mike Schindler
The purpose is to develop certain skills or techniques which can be used on other works. How is it not being creative?
Simply put, that movie is not your creation. It's somebody else's idea and finished work.
If you really want to develop video production skills in the most effective manner the very best thing to do is edit footage you videotaped. You learn a lot more about both shooting and editing when you do that. You quickly find out certain types of footage cut a lot better than other kinds. It makes you think more professionally about shot lists, shooting schedules, lighting and matching shots, how your shots are going to cut together and how it will work into the finished project.
You can't learn all those things anywhere near as effectively by playing around with footage that has already been cut into a finished motion picture.
quote: Mike Schindler
Was the original trailer cutter or poster designer not being creative?
In light of the average quality of today's movie trailers, no, I can't say that guy is actually being very creative. But creating a new movie trailer can be a creative endeavor. Some trailers have footage that is newly created for just that trailer. At the bare minimum, the person who creates the real movie trailer is a professional getting paid for the work. The finished work is serving a marketing purpose. And that trailer editor is starting with a lot more footage than what a hobbyist will get from a DVD.
The marketing arm of a motion picture production has access to the talent in the movie. They have access to all sorts of other resources. They can do more than just throw in footage from the movie alone.
quote: Mike Schindler
All the more reason for someone like Mark to say, "Hey. I could do something better. Let me try that."
Actually coming up with something "better" is a big problem when you don't have all the resources that are available to the actual movie production's marketing department.
In addition to that, I have to bring up a very important point:
Movie trailers, like the movies themselves, are created by many people not just one.
One single person in hobby-land is not going to out-do the finish quality coming from a large team of people with different, yet highly focused talents. There's lots of different creative demands for a movie or just its movie trailer. It takes more than just having a good concept and decent editing scheme. You need specialists from all sorts of areas to make it look and sound professional. Everything from the sound mix to the on-screen lettering and graphics has to be produced well. If you just leave all the work in a real movie trailer to only one guy the end result will very likely be just mediocre, if even that.
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Mike Schindler
Phenomenal Film Handler
Posts: 1039
From: Oak Park, IL, USA
Registered: Jun 2002
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posted 04-13-2007 08:14 PM
quote: Tim Reed
You'd rather move shots around from a DVD than work on something tangible?! You must have a lot of free time.
What do you mean by tangible? Regardless, cutting a trailer is more than moving shots around. Certainly, that's part of it. Cutting together a non-narrative work allows for all sorts of creative abstract juxtapositions, or what have you. But just like cutting a movie, it's also about sifting through an excessive amount of footage to find what's needed. And when you take into account that the ratio of available footage to runtime is roughly 10:1, and that you're not working off of a script, it seems to me that cutting a trailer allows for a substantial amount of creativity. I wish I did have the time to cut trailers, but unfortunately, I can't say I do.
quote: Tim Reed
I don't think too many guild members are working on student films, anyway.
I'm not sure what you're getting at. Most of the guild members I've known spend most of their time logging footage, as opposed to editing.
quote: Tim Reed
At the very least, a student film has the promise of a life ahead of it.
That would be a reason to cut one, but the odds of anyone outside of the filmmakers watching it is so low that that can't be the deciding factor, especially if that's your only source of material.
quote: Bobby Henderson
Simply put, that movie is not your creation. It's somebody else's idea and finished work.
Yes, but the trailer you are creating is a new work. That finished movie is the equivalent of the raw footage you receive as the editor of a movie.
quote: Bobby Henderson
If you really want to develop video production skills in the most effective manner the very best thing to do is edit footage you videotaped.
But we're not talking about video production skills. We're talking about editing skills. And as an editor, I believe it is more educational to cut stuff that you haven't shot, because you don't enter into it with any preconceived notions. Hell, when I'm cutting a movie I don't even like to go on set.
On the flip side, if we were talking about video production, I'd argue that it's best not to cut your own footage, because an editor can bring a different perspective to your footage which you may not have seen.
quote: Bobby Henderson
One single person in hobby-land is not going to out-do the finish quality coming from a large team of people with different, yet highly focused talents.
So what? You should just admit defeat and give up? Besides, I don't think that's true. Someone who completely embodies the spirit of the single person in hobby-land is DESPERADO's own director, Robert Rodriguez. And Mark's trailer, while not stupendously mind-blowing, is certainly on par with what's out there today in the real world. Nothing in that trailer suggests that it's not professional. If you were to tell me that it played in theaters, I wouldn't doubt it for a second.
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Mark Strube
Master Film Handler
Posts: 322
From: Milwaukee, WI, United States
Registered: Feb 2007
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posted 04-14-2007 01:49 AM
I'm glad you see this more from my perspective Mike. I've loved trailers since I was 10 or 11 years old, even before I had the internet. I used to set my VCR to record them from the pay-per-view promo feeds that the local cable company got every week early in the morning (and didn't scramble). I would even make my own tapes of recorded movies, adding those trailers to the beginning of the tape. No clue why, I guess I liked the idea of putting together a little presentation.
But back to the trailers, they ARE creative. Some are more derivative than others, while others are very well put-together pieces of work, that are capable of evoking emotion in the viewer in a matter of minutes. Just because something is a marketing tool or commercial doesn't mean it's not an art. The same applies to the movies themselves... with both movies and their trailers, some are more marketing/commercial and less art, but this certainly isn't always the case.
When I started doing these trailer edits, I didn't go in intending to learn different aspects of film production. I'm certainly very interested in that, and I'll probably try some of my own one day (I have a high def camera collecting dust), but this was purely for my love of movie trailers. I had (and still do) visions of one day working for one of the many trailer production houses... maybe starting with simple TV ads or something of the sort.
If I pursue this, having a little portfolio of self-edited trailers that I did just for fun, at home, by myself... certainly can't hurt my chances. Does this clear up my perspective a little better?
For those that are interested, here's a few more of my better edits.
This is a TV spot I made for Bad Boys II, before the movie was released. I used footage from all the different trailers, and was lucky enough to have one of them in 5.1, so I was able to single out the dialogue and re-cut it to my liking, adding my own music mix in the process. Link. Note this wasn't really an exercise in creating something better than the existing marketing campaign... one of the music tracks in there was even already used in one of the trailers. It was more to see if I was capable of cutting a TV spot, with the very short time constraints. Granted, it would be more of a challenge going from a full movie.
Finally, this is a trailer I made for the video game "Enter The Matrix." Note that the text graphics are borrowed from the existing trailer for this game. Here's the backstory - awhile back, before the two last Matrix movies were released, but when all the trailers for Reloaded, Enter The Matrix, and The Animatrix was available, I put together what I called The Matrix Megatrailer. It's far from perfect, or even really "good" but at the time there were loads of people putting Matrix edits like this together, so mine stood out since it was a bit more professional. The president of Shiny Studios, the company working on the Matrix game, caught wind of this trailer (it was making the rounds, an insane number of downloads), was impressed by it, especially when compared to other fan edits out there, and asked me if I'd like to do something like that for their videogame. I couldn't have any new footage, but I got a load of links to existing raw game footage and interviews that were available online. What resulted a few days later was this. I even had to add my own sound effects since the game footage had either no audio or unusable audio (I forget at this point)... for that I popped in my Matrix DVD and found sound FX that would work for the footage. I did the same for most of the last half of my "Megatrailer." Sadly, the president of Shiny told me it couldn't be used as an official trailer since it didn't have any new footage (go figure, exactly what I wanted in the first place)... but it was still cool to be noticed like that.
(If you're curious about the megatrailer, here it is. I'm not particularily proud of it, especially since the two opening "segments" are lifted from existing trailers with minor changes made, but I suppose it might be fun to watch. I especially like how my "siezure cut" emulation of the original Matrix trailer turned out... that was a lot of edits.)
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Mark Strube
Master Film Handler
Posts: 322
From: Milwaukee, WI, United States
Registered: Feb 2007
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posted 04-14-2007 03:50 AM
I didn't really see a "blasting" here but okay. Your sarcastic pity is appreciated, but unneeded.
quote: Frank Dubrois
For my critique, I don't see any genius here...you take pieces of movie trailers and edit them together to make your own trailer. Ok. So?
That was only for the Matrix megatrailer and the Bad Boys II tv spot. (Also, as I stated earlier, the megatrailer only uses portions of existing trailers... there's large segments, especially the footage from the first movie, that were entirely edited by me.) The Enter The Matrix video game trailer was edited from a lot of in-game footage, interviews, and only a few snippets from the actual existing promo trailer. The Desperado trailer was wholly edited from the movie itself. Show me a trailer for Desperado on DVD that has all that footage and dialogue and music in it (and that's in widescreen) and I'll show you a very, very shocked expression. The thread title mentioned nothing about genius, so your false hopes aren't my problem. ![[Wink]](wink.gif)
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