Cutting a trailer – 5:13

I’ve spent the last couple of days cutting the trailer for 5:13 with director, Arivind Abraham.

The one thing that actually really annoys me about trailers, in general, is how much they tend to give away.  It’s at the point now where I actually AVOID trailers as much as possible.  Especially when it comes down to scary films – I want to go and see a film and jump at the scary parts.  I want to be surprised.  I don’t want to sit there and know what’s coming up.  I want to experience the film with the characters.

Examples of decent marketing campaigns would be Taken and Cloverfield.  Taken’s trailers tended not to feature anything that happened outside the first 20 minutes of the film (for the most part, they featured just the phone conversation between Liam Neeson and the kidnappers).  Cloverfield was pretty much a teaser campaign – going into the cinema, I didn’t know what the ‘event’ was.

I think it’s been several years since anybody’s gone to see a film solely for the special effects.  That might have washed a few years ago with Jurassic Park, but I think the audiences are (more than) aware that great visuals don’t guarantee a knock out film.  That’s sort of why I don’t understand it when film makers fill trailers with all of the killer moments from the film.  I mean, sometimes trailers are treated like a “3 minute version” of a film.  And that’s bad.

So, going into the 5:13 trailer edit, the idea was to make the audience want to go see the movie.  We didn’t want to give away the story, we didn’t want to blow the “jumpy bits” in a trailer.  The goal was to present a minute-or-so teaser that leaves the audience wanting more.

Trailer to follow soon.