Critique my new trailer please.

Check out my new trailer for my feature Amber. I'd love to get some feedback from it. Any comments, critiques?

- Christopher Miles

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_Iz17H1w3E&feature=plcp
 
Nice work!

Good job, Lake. Looks like you got a decent story on your hands and some juicy scenes. Nice!

As far as improving the trailer, I have a few suggestions. Take them with a grain of salt, because I'm only critiquing your trailer as a "trailer." In other words, you may need something different from a standard trailer to raise funds on kickstarter or whatever, and, in such case, my suggestions might not be relevant. Nevertheless...


WAYS TO IMPROVE YOUR TRAILER

1) Shorten it. I think the current running time is 3:05, right? That's way too long. Get it down to 90 seconds or two minutes at the most. You may think your story simply can't be summarized in fewer than 3 minutes but you'd be DEAD wrong to think that. It can be summarized in 90 seconds. Easily. What's really hard for most filmmakers to realize is that less you show, the more we want to see it.

2) Don't repeat your shots. You have some nifty little fights scenes and shoot outs. Here's the trick to cutting a trailer: do NOT show a good visual more than once. This might be really painful stuff for you to remove, but I have only one thing to say... get over it! If you want a ton of people to watch your movie, you absolutely CANNOT let them see so much of your best scenes. You have to tease them. You have to give them only glimpses! You have to give them a REASON to watch the whole movie. That's the seduction of it. If you fail to seduce them -- then what you're doing is you're showing way too much of the fistfights or the shoot outs, and your audience mentally says to themselves, "Oh, OK, I see where that was goin'... I don't have to watch the movie now." Get it? You gotta DEPRIVE your audience. You have to show them just enough so that they are dying to see more.

3) Get rid of every single cut that doesn't add production value. No offense but your freeway shots aren't good enough to be shown more than once. The Amber sign is great, but the random shot of a bunch of cars is mediocre. First of all, there's no story to the freeway shot. It's not informing us as an audience. It's just B-roll. Second of all, it's not an exciting shot. Nothing is blowing up or flipping over; it's just cars. I think you have a few other shots of stuff that honestly doesn't add production value. Lose 'em!

4) Your visual of the guy carrying the struggling child toward the house is phenomenal!!! What a brilliant shot. I love it. Well done. Now, here's the deal... show less of it! And find a way to make THAT SHOT your most important shot of first half of the trailer. In other words, highlight with a pause or a fade out fade in just before. Or music. Or whatever. But let us sit with that shot. It's really emotional. Powerful. Violent.

5) Your trailer sets up the conflict about the child abduction... then it sort of abandons the abduction and focuses on the hero's OTHER conflicts. Pick one story or the other. I personally vote that you center on recovering the missing child... but my vote doesn't mean you have to skip the gun stuff and the fistfight stuff altogether. Just remember to tell one main story throughout the trailer.

6) Some of your dialogue sounds bad. This is either because of bad ADR or bad acting. The easy solution is that I'm pretty sure you do NOT need most of the dialogue in your trailer. In other words, most of the dialogue in your trailer is NOT serving the trailer. It's expendable. So in that case, cut it. If you're stuck needing to communicate a storypoint, then use a title card instead.

7) Don't deviate from the standard structure. Don't try to reinvent the wheel with trailers. All trailer follow a very specific recipe for any given era. It's almost a paint by the numbers type of thing. Specifically, just after your trailer climaxes, you start listing credit after credit of who was involved. That's not standard. These days, you just don't see that type of denouement. Now, if that sort of thing is necessary for Kickstarter, then by all means, do it. But, again, if your goal is to create a professional-looking trailer, then don't linger on those credits.


Ok, those are my major notes. There are some smaller items but you can get feedback from other folks about that. Meanwhile, I wanna reiterate that I think you have a really cool story on your hands. I wish you the very best in your work! Hope you have fun!

Shanked
 
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