Ideally, they whet your appetite for a good movie and satisfy your appetite for a bad movie.
Well said. I absolutely insist on getting to the theater on time, and feel as if I've missed something if I arrive too late for the trailers.
Movies with identity-based marketing campaigns, like October Baby, could use stage 3 ads.
When I had a short-form improv group in college we invented a trailer game. A narrator asks for a couple of suggestions, then starts narrating. Most narrators would go for, "IN A WORLD WHERE something something ONLY ONE MAN CAN STOP IT" but I always preferred "What do you get when a something something who can't find love meets a something something who just can't stop?"
"What do you get when a something something who can't find love meets a something something who just can't stop?"
New mouseover text?
Wouldn't stage 2 show people watching the movie being trailed? Are there trailers like that?
I struggled with 5, but decided the stages need some small adjustments to map onto immersion-based products.
"Mysteriously starring Robert Montgomery and You!"
(The actual film is not so good.)
3: something something was a whatever who something UNTIL whatever else made him something in a however he never something.
Wouldn't stage 2 show people watching the movie being trailed? Are there trailers like that?
Sometimes for horror movies. Paranormal Activity for example.
Is there a Stage 4 of advertising where the commercial is something completely bizarre that gets your attention, but has nothing to do with the product being sold, and you often don't even know what that product is?
How does that kind of advertising work?
I think that's terminal, metastasized advertising.
10: That's a typical undergraduate education.
You could imagine trailers which were like the Natalie Portman short for "The Darjeeling Limited." Same actors/characters/director/feel, but not actually in the movie.
There are trailers where people who just saw the movie enthuse about how great it was. That also seems stage-2-ish to me.
@14
I've noticed over the years that when a film's advertising campaign consists mainly of interviews with audience members as they leave the theater, that's a surprisingly reliable indicator that the film in question sucks.
14, 15, 17: I guess I'm making a possibly untenable distinction in my mind between trailers and advertisements for films.
Trailers play with the lights off. Ads play with the lights on. You turn off your cell phone after the ads and before the trailers. It's rude to talk during trailers but not during ads. It's easy to make a strong distinction.
In my experience, movie trailers have gotten worse and worse in recent years. They're basically at stage 3.5, which is "show the audience the most 'exciting' bits of the film, even if it spoils the whole thing". Trailers have become completely useless at their sole purpose - persuading you to watch a film. The good films are ruined and the bad films are shown up to be as bad as they really are.
when a film's advertising campaign consists mainly of interviews with audience members as they leave the theater, that's a surprisingly reliable indicator that the film in question sucks.
Right. Cheap to make (you're doing and taping the focus groups anyway), keeps distribution costs down for a known loser.
Per the thread the other day, this trailer for Airport is now officially funnier than Airplane. It's a bit long (but shorter than a movie), but worth watching to the end if you're an Airplane fan.
I'm with Ginger in 20. There's no need to pay to see the movie in most cases. And I can slide the car sideways myself in a parking lot on early Sunday mornings.
Two quotes come to mind:
"I want to see beautiful people doing amazing things." (Grant Morrison)
And, more apropos:
"Do you want to know why people do drugs? I will tell you: Drugs are the only thing that make you feel the way that people in television commercials look like they feel." (Timothy Leary? William S. Burroughs? I have seen it attributed to both, but it seems a little too sharp-eyed for Leary.)
In geeky circles there's been some speculation as to why the recent John Carter was such a bomb.
It occurs to me that after seeing the trailer for it I knew literally nothing about the movie except that it involved guys in loincloths running around with swords.
Granted, there's a demographic that would see that and think: "Hey! Guys in loincloths running around with swords. I'm all over that!" But apparently that demographic isn't big enough to make a movie a hit these days.
Granted, there's a demographic that would see that and think: "Hey! Guys in loincloths running around with swords. I'm all over that!"
I may have seen this movie opening weekend.
Although, in part, I wanted to see the probably sinking ship. I also kind of liked (and saw in the theater) Ishtar and Howard the Duck.
The trailer for Prometheus really is quite good, but only because it makes for such a contrast with most trailers. Apart from the "splice together the loudest and most exciting moments" tactic that 20 references, the widespread shittiness is also evident in trailers like this one (quite a good movie, incidentally) which consist of jumbles of unrelated images and badly-edited dialogue more or less just slapped together.
27: I liked Howard the Duck when I saw it in the theater.
I bet John Carter will develop a not-insignificant cult following.
A lot of movie trailers of the splice-together-exciting-moments variety are dedicated to trying to get the viewer's juices flowing, no?
I'm thinking vaguely of a set of observations I ran across some time ago that pointed out that the sheer speed of scene cuts gets adrenalin going (allegedly). The piece I read on this asked us to simply count the number of scenes/cuts/camera angle switches in the average television commercial, in a mere 30 seconds. You'll see 30 or 40 or more in many commercials. Switch-switch-switch-switch-switch, on and on and on, bang bang bang bang bang, here there here there here there and on. We've gotten used to following the 'story' in such commercials, but they actually ask a fair amount of us. Our eyes are necessarily darting to and fro, and so on.
The suggestion was that this is stimulative, but we've gotten so used to it that we scarcely notice.
Anyway, try it some time: count all those camera cuts in a commercial.
20: Correct but omits a third category, the spoilery trailer for a bad movie that, by virtue of including nothing but the cool bits and effectively signaling that the rest is dross, is a satisfying experience of a creative work.
Luckily, since our eyes normally dart to and fro at an average rate of about one dart per second, we've got plenty of practice with that. Otherwise I bet we'd get tired and have to stare at the floor or, on weekends, a wall.
There's a cable channel on our system that is all trailers, all the time. It's in HD, naturally. My wife watches it sometimes.
22: And you thought those things only happened in the movies:
35 was me. (On my new laptop!)
4, 15, and 31 are correct.
12 is excellent.
Luckily, since our eyes normally dart to and fro at an average rate of about one dart per second, we've got plenty of practice with that
This is fantastically relevant to parsimon's comment!
37: it's like shadowboxing! Get shaped up for the big show.
Anyhow I am legitimately pretty sure I've read it argued that the fact that we're able to process saccades explains why we're able to comprehend jump cuts, in that the cuts sort of replicate what happens in saccadic suppression. Not going to google, though. But it isn't per se obvious (or wasn't, before those French dudes) that the human brain would be able to process non-continuous visual narrative at all.
More directly, the relevance to parsimon's comment is that our brains are quite used to dealing with a completely different set of visual input every second, so from that perspective rapid editing isn't really cognitively effortful at all. Could be in other ways.
Sifu, you haven't even asked me what kind of laptop I got!
I rejected all your sage gee-Mac advice and got a Lenovo Ideapad. (Company refurb, nicely loaded, full warranty, awesome customer support from not-big-box store. $525.)
I am glad you enjoy it. I've never trusted Lenovo based on what may very well be unfounded, vaguely jingoistic anecdotes, but then, what do I trust?
Yup. They do your Shakespeare-retyping for you!
Is there a Stage 4 of advertising where the commercial is something completely bizarre that gets your attention, but has nothing to do with the product being sold, and you often don't even know what that product is?
If you watch long enough you find out the person narrating is a Mormon.
Is there a Stage 4 of advertising where the commercial is something completely bizarre that gets your attention, but has nothing to do with the product being sold, and you often don't even know what that product is?
At least in the UK, this describes almost all car ads. US car ads seem to be a lot blunter.
Tony Kaye's 1993 ad for Dunlop tyres
Is there a Stage 4 of advertising where the commercial is something completely bizarre that gets your attention, but has nothing to do with the product being sold, and you often don't even know what that product is?
Cigarette ads, after the UK banned saying fags were good for you, sexy, successful, etc, but before we outright banned advertising them.
Result, lots of ads that consisted entirely of incredibly luxurious high-concept graphics that were completely abstract and quite surreal, because the tobacco industry still had a gigantic ad budget to spend and London is full of people who could help 'em spend it.
I don't think anybody has yet mentioned the genre of ads, pioneered by video game companies in the '90s, best summarized as "buy this because you're a stupid asshole who does stupid things, you asshole. Also, it's gross, and terrible for you." Those I often find puzzling. The ad form of negging, I guess.
Or the equally baffling sub-genre, videogame design course ads that display ignorance of and contempt for videogames and their players.
Actually I think I misdescribed the most common version; it's more like "if you use our product you will suffer enormous physical harm or possibly die."
I should probably dig up an example, but I'm enormously lazy.
it's more like "if you use our product you will suffer enormous physical harm or possibly die."
Somebody should put them in touch with the tobacco companies.
57: "Possibly die" would be an improvement over the default outcome.
It's the selling point of cryonics, for example.
27 has some company on Ishtar, if not on Howard the Duck, which is madness. (I, of course, saw Howard the Duck as a kid and loved it enough to buy the novelization. I wish I had known about the actual Steve Gerber comic, but that probably would have been too weird and off-putting, unlike a movie about a crass transdimensional duck who falls for a human girl and is played by a awarf in a bad duck costume.)
Isn't the selling point of cryonics "possibly resurrect"? Or is there a pre-death cryonics movement? Wikipedia suggests that's illegal.
62: Not that I'm aware of - but there's a difference (or at least there *might* be) between being legally dead and being irreparably dead.
I tend to think of only the latter as definitely dead.
"Not that I'm aware of" was meant to refer to the possibility of a pre-death cryonics movement. And AFAIK the first and last sentence of 62 are true.
There is of course the problem of patients with Alzheimer's, who are not unlikely to be mostly erased long before legal death.
I know no one clicks on the links, but really if you liked Airplane even one tiny bit, you owe yourself watching the Airport trailer I linked in 22. A much better trailer for Airplane than the actual Airplane trailer.
Stormcrow ain't lying. That is some seriously funny trailer action in 22 there.
ADA QUONSETT
A ROLE MODEL FOR US ALL
AN ICE-COLD PSYCHOBITCH LIKE NO NE OTHER
there's a difference...between being legally dead and being irreparably dead.
"There's a big difference between mostly dead and all dead."
Somebody I showed the trailer to pointed out something which I did know but had forgotten, that Ariplane! was in fact basically a remake of the 1950s film Zero Hour. But I never realized that many famous lines and scenes were pretty much identical. A compilation of corresponding scenes.
Some friends of mine, who are familiar with John Carter from books, said the movie wasn't great but not as bad as many say. Their interpretation is that one of its biggest failings is assuming that regular people know the backstory - apparently, people involved in making the film thought it would be as familiar to the general public as, say, War of the Worlds.
65, 69: A very belated bit of rest of the story, turns out Arthur Hailey wrote both Zero Hour and Airport, the former just after he started writing (he was a WWII RAF veteran).
