Martin Noficzer

Teaser trailers are short videos that are produced in order to promote a film and to announce the release of a new film. Trailers are usually quite short ranging from 30 seconds to about two minutes in length and usually contain very little – sometimes none – content from the actual film. They are in most cases released a couple of months before release of the full film in order to grab the attention of potential viewers and in some cases in order to raise or maintain the hype for a film in order to ensure success at release. The first appearance of a trailer was seen 1913 when Nils Granlund has created and released a short promotional film for a new Marcus Loew musical named “The Pleasure Seekers”. He was the one to introduce this technique into the industry as his similar works could be seen soon afterwards with a film featuring Charlie Chaplin. Up until the 1950’s, trailers consisted of key scenes from the upcoming film with descriptive text with an underscore and narration. Due to the arival of “New Hollywood” in the 1960’s new form of trailers were becoming popular, those without any text and the introduction of quick editing style has changed the trailers that were used at the time. In the modern film industry longer, more descriptive and informative trailers are used. They contain more content from the final product and are rarely commentated, however it is quite common to use background music in order to create a certain effect on the viewers (e.g. upbeat music for comedy films or orchestral music for action films). It is oftentimes the case that the scenes in the trailers are specifically made for this purpose and are not present in the finished product, or that the trailer contains deleted scenes that did not make the final cut of the film.

Comedy films are focused on making the audience laugh. There are several types of comedy films, and usually films adapt a hybrid genre of comedy. The earliest comedies are often considered to be the film of Charlie Chaplin, although the very first comedy to be released was “Watering the Gardener” by the Lumiére brothers in Action films are focused on fighting, war or rivalry in most cases and follows a hero, who will fight against and overcome the protagonist against all odds. The story is often secondary to the visual appeal and showcase of thrilling events in the film. The first action films appeared in the 1940’s and 1950’s in the form of war and western films. A very famous action series is the James Bond series, which has started in the 1960’s. Action-comedy is a hybrid subgenre of action films and hints of comedy. The genre often includes an action oriented film, with comical scenes, one-liners by characters, stunts that may be funny and usually include a plot of partners. These are usually very different and do not well together at the start, but throughout the film they work out to be great together. A great example of this would be “Rush Hour” a film starring Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker. The genre was made famous by Jackie Chan, who has started out as an actor in martial arts movies, but has later on moved on to producing his own movies which were to become action-comedy films. In some cases action-comedy films are considered family film due to their comic nature.

Although I am somewhat interested in films, I do not follows films and I am not a huge fan of films, therefore it is unlikely that I will be choosing to work on a movie trailer. Although I have found out a lot of useful information along with the history of my chosen genre as well as looking into how a teaser campaign works, I do feel that I am not experienced enough in working on films in order to chose to work on a trailer for my project