One of the key things this week’s Stop/Eject publicity surge has done for us is to enlarge our online community of fans and followers. I’m sure there are loads of creative and talented people in this community, and now I want you to prove me right. To that end, we’re launching a competition to design the film’s poster.
To tell you all about it, here is some bloke we dragged in off the street.
Like three buses coming at once, this week has been a manic one for Stop/Eject publicity.
On Monday afternoon I was interviewed and photographed for the The Hereford Times. (I’m not sure when this will be published. Probably not this week.)
A few hours later and 100 miles away, Sophie was interviewed by BBC East Midlands Today. The report was broadcast that same evening (just after a piece about The Dark Knight Rises filming in Nottingham), featuring huge swathes of the trailer, the web address on screen for ages and of course Sophie brilliantly talking the whole thing up. If you missed it, a friend filmed it off his TV screen…
On Tuesday, the Herefordshire Media Network held their regular meeting, at which they kindly allowed me to screen the trailer and pitch video for Stop/Eject and to say a few words about my experiences of crowd-funding. It went down very well, with many people saying complimentary things afterwards.
Huge thanks to Indy Mogul for this exposure, which has almost doubled my number of subscribers. If any IM viewers have found their way to this blog – welcome! I hope you enjoy the heady mix of filmmaking trials and tribulations, breakdowns, evaluations, “how to”s and occasional self-indulgent rants.
As a result of all this exposure, the post-production fundraising total now stands at £430. That means the £400 public reward has been released: a podcast about the first day of shooting.
Very shortly we’ll be announcing the title of the £500 public reward – our first mystery reward.
We’ve also topped 100 likes on Stop/Eject’s Facebook page, as a result of which we’ll be launching something special in the next few days…
A rare moment to consult the script. Photo: Sophie Black
Col constantly ribs me about the lack of a first assistant director on Stop/Eject, and the consequent lack of adherence to the schedule. But as I edit the film, I’m appreciating more and more the other duties of a first AD and the consequences of those duties going undischarged.
Because part of the first’s job is to literally assist the director – to help them keep track of things which can easily get forgotten amidst the chaos of filming. Things like crossing the line, getting enough coverage and not missing out bits of the script. (Two other crew members that a big budget production will have who will also be looking out for those things are the script supervisor and the editor – because the editor will be cutting the material the day after you shoot it, and may be able to tell you before you leave a location that you need an extra shot.)
So here are some examples of the moronic cock-ups I made, which might well have been avoided if I’d had a first and/or a script supervisor looking out for me:
Tommy Draper wrote a great stage direction in one scene: “She opens the fridge. It’s as empty as her life.” Unfortunately I chose to shoot it in a way that made it impossible to tell the fridge was empty, because I didn’t pay close enough attention to the script during filming.
In another scene, I wrote that the cellophane is torn off an object before it is used. I included that detail in the script because, as a writer, I knew that otherwise the audience would not necessarily understand the important point that the object was brand new and unused. Somehow this got dropped from the scene during rehearsals, and it wasn’t until I saw the film edited together that I realised how crucial the cellophane was.
In scene seven, the most complex of the film, we decided during rehearsals to alter the timing of an incident. One side effect of this – which again I didn’t notice until I saw the edit – was that the shots I had storyboarded (and thus the shots that I filmed) no longer established satisfactorily the whereabouts of one of the characters at a critical moment.
In scene 24 I crossed the line. You can see this at the very end of the trailer.
The Dark Side of the Earth’s first AD Andrew McEwan (right) on set. Photo: Richard Unger
The omission of things in the script are particularly annoying (a) because I co-wrote the bloody thing and should have noticed, and (b) because any good writer takes care to be economical with words and only put in things which are important.
Some of these things can be fixed with pick-ups. For example, I filmed a close-up of my wife’s hands unwrapping the cellophane in our flat recently. But others have no solution beyond a major reshoot, which would be very hard to justify. So what you end up with is a subtle erosion of the quality of the film, and this is one of the reasons that a more expensive film looks more expensive. A bigger crew does mean more attention to detail and thus higher production values in every respect.
I share these thoughts with you not because I’m any less proud of Stop/Eject or feel like I need to make excuses for it, but simply to pass on a lesson the project has taught me. It’s very easy to think of a first assistant director as merely a time-keeper, but if you work without one you should appreciate that there are other strings to their bow, and your project may suffer more lasting effects than just a tired cast and crew.
Another guest blog from Stop/Eject‘s producer Sophie Black today. She’s been hard at work creating the Electronic Press Kit, to promote the post-production crowd-funding campaign, and I asked her to share her thoughts on what makes a good EPK.
The Electronic Press Kit is an important part of post-production because we use it to send to regional news programmes and television shows, in the hope that they will do a feature on our film. There’s a lot of things which can be put into it – and in some cases it’s down to choice and what you think will best promote your film – but I got my checklist from Chris Gore’s Ultimate Film Festival Survival Guide, which I’ve been using as a guidebook. Actually it’s a corking book, and very useful, so I recommend that you get a copy. But, in the meantime, here is his checklist for EPK assemblage, and my notes on each:
Two Trailers – one with music and one without. This is mainly in case they want to show the trailer but are fearful of copyright infringement with the music. We included just the one copy of the trailer, with music, because the sound track (not the score) is still in early days and it might feel seem somewhat exposed without the music. If you have the same concerns then you can do what we did and include a copy of the license agreement for your music, so that they feel safe to use it. If you haven’t got clearance for your music – what are you doing? Go and get some at once! And if you can’t, you lose all chance of having your trailer played anywhere that gets attention, and you’re wasting valuable promotional opportunities. Another reason to only include one trailer is that ours came with a swanky little pitch video, so there’s two videos included in the package already!
Selected Scenes – basically this is an opportunity for you to put in the best scenes of the film to show how great your film is, or to show the general style and tone of your film (if your trailer hasn’t done this enough for you). But of course, you do run the risk of giving away too much too soon. We didn’t include any scenes in our EPK because ours is to promote the trailer and the final funding campaign, rather than a finished film (yes, this does mean there may be a second EPK at a later date).
B-roll
A Making-Of Featurette – Gore says that this is optional but I LOVE behind the scenes footage. No news room is going to want to show a full making-of in a small report, but including a snippet of one can entice them in (a person at a planning desk is still ‘your audience’, after all) and make them want to do their own piece on the film. Particularly when targeting local news, clips of their best scenery with film crews working on them – and looking all professional – will basically spell out the story for them. So we didn’t include a full Making-of, but I did include a happy little montage of the crew assembling the alcove and equipment in the Rivergardens, taken straight from the first podcast. Lovely Belper Scenery: check. Crew looking professional and hard at work: check.
B-roll Footage – again, optional, but I recommend it more than anything. If you weren’t lucky enough to have a news crew capturing your activity whilst you were still on set (and, let’s be honest, you’d have to have quite a name for yourself for that to happen, and in that case you probably wouldn’t want them there), then sending your own behind-the-scenes footage is the only way for that to be featured in the report. News stories about films being made, particularly by independent filmmakers in local areas, are often character-driven and at least half made-up by behind the scenes footage. In conclusion, don’t submit clips of the director looking thoughtful and saying ‘action’, or the actors rehearsing a scene in front of a nice camera, and you probably won’t get a story! Again, any clips you do send should be relevant to the people you’re sending it too, so the majority of ours showed the Belper/Matlock streets and landmarks being used.
Interview footage
Interviews – and here is where the second half of a character-driven news report comes from. Companies like the BBC will always shoot their own interviews, as a rule, but submitting your own interview clips will show them the type of thing the cast/crew would say in an interview, and suggests that they are in fact worth interviewing! Even better, get a clip of them saying something along the lines of “the local area is brilliant etc.” then it shows the crew will have relevant things to say for the local news channels, and that we might even make them look good – it gives them a sample sound bite and hopefully shows that the programme will get some good publicity in return. I put the interview clips in order of relevance to who I was sending to, assuming that the news crew will lose interest towards the end – that’s a good rule with anything like this, actually. Put your best stuff first – these people are very busy and might not even have chance to see all of it, even if they want to, so you have to snare them quick. So the clip of Neil talking about how lovely it was to film in the East Midlands went right towards the top. The majority of the interview snippets came from Neil and Georgina, being our main attractions, but I also included a clip of myself from an early podcast, purely because I was talking about the locations and showing how beautiful they looked.
Promotional Images – just as with a regular press kit, it is important to include your poster, logo, website screenshot etc., only in this case in a digital format. If you’re lucky, your logo may even be used in the background when the newsreader headlines your story, so make sure it’s in a high resolution! I also included a scan of our Belper News feature – the way I see it, that showed that we were already ‘news worthy’ and hope that it encourages further publicity.
Yes, that is a big list, but put it all together and you’ll have yourself a bonafide, well-researched-looking EPK!
At the start of the DVD, you should also include your company logo, and a disclaimer which is well-worded to discourage people from spreading your material willy-nilly without putting them off promoting it at all.
Before EVERY clip on the EPK, make sure you include the title of the film, the director’s name, a brief description of what the clip is, and a total running time of said clip. This makes the whole thing look very corporate but is helpful for the people researching and compiling your story on the other side.
You also have to silence the creative editor inside you, which is the part I found hardest. The clips you submit should be snappy and interesting, cutting straight to the relevant shots of people working and the local scenery looking great, or a one-sentence answer (if possible) in your interview clips. There’s no room for elegant pacing here.
Finished EPK
One area where you can be creative, however, is in the presentation of the package itself. Don’t just put the clips onto a basic disk with a note – here is an opportunity for you to show how professional and interesting your film is before they’ve even watched the disk, which will make them want to do so. I created the disks using Lightscribe, featuring the film’s logo, and the covering letter/DVD contents sheet were made using our original posters as backgrounds. This kept everything in our colour scheme and made it looks as though everything was designed specifically for the EPK. It’s also important to ring up the news companies in advance to make initial contact; you can get addresses and numbers on the internet but you have to track down the name of the person to send the EPK directly to, to avoid it going unsorted in a forgotten pile. Plus it gets your names into the reporters’ heads before the EPK arrives, and they will (hopefully) know to look out for it.
Cheers, Sophie. Let’s hope this gets us some local news coverage.
I hope you enjoyed last week’s Stop/Eject lighting breakdowns, but you’re probably wondering by now how post-production is going on the film.
Our hallway after the shoot. Photo: Katie Lake
The first month after the shoot was spent recovering, catching up on non-Stop/Eject stuff and getting everything ready for the launch of the second crowd-funding campaign – building the website, editing the trailer (and doing some VFX shots for it), filming the pitch video and creating the first public rewards. So it wasn’t until about five weeks after wrapping that I had a first assembly. This ran to about 24 minutes and was very slow and clunky, as first assemblies usually are.
Since then I’ve been gradually making the film more watchable, tightening it up, adding temporary music and sound effects. Yesterday I reached the stage where I was ready to get some feedback on it, so I showed it to my wife Katie and to the producer, Sophie Black. They had some good suggestions which will inform how I proceed as I try to get it to a stage where it can be shown to some people not involved in the project, who can watch it with fresh eyes and really tell me whether the story and character arcs are working.
More pick-ups
My list of pick-ups to shoot is being added to faster than I can cross them off, and every time I show the edit to a new viewer there is potential for more to be suggested. Luckily most of these can easily be shot in my living room with Katie’s hands and existing props. (I’ve never been a big fan of insert shots, but they were unavoidable when so much of the film is about pressing buttons, and they’ve proven extremely useful when it comes to pick-ups.)
Eventually I’ll be able to lock the picture, meaning that no further changes are made to the picture edit from then on (theoretically). It will then be down to the composer, the sound designer, the mixer, the visual effects artists and the colourist to put the flesh on the skeleton and complete the movie. Needless to say, you will hear plenty about who these people are and what they get up to right here on this blog.
P.S. Don’t forget to spread the word about our crowd-funding campaign at stopejectmovie.com
Lara Greenway and Ray Bullock Jnr. watch the Soul Searcher trailer for, like, the gazillionth time.
For independent filmmakers, there was a time when trailers were something you didn’t worry about until the movie was finished and you were looking to get it distributed. Maybe you cut a basic one during or just after production to show the cast and crew some of the fruits of their hard work. (This proved a massive morale booster during Soul Searcher‘s six-week principal photography slog.)
But times have changed. Now the saturation of broadband has made video on the web an everyday thing, and a trailer for your short film or micro-budget feature posted on-line has a good chance of reaching some kind of audience and starting to build word of mouth about your project. Not to mention the rise of crowd-funding, for which having a pitch video – typically consisting partly of a trailer – is essential. Indeed, shooting a trailer before you’ve shot the film, in order to raise finance, has become extremely common.
So today I’m going to share some advice on editing trailers. I can’t claim to be an expert on trailer editing – it’s not an area of editing I’ve ever been able to specialise in – but the trailers I’ve cut generally get a good reaction, so I must be doing something right.
By the way, these tips assume that you’ve actually shot the film. If not, you’re more in the area of a teaser trailer, which is a whole other subject.
Music
The first trailer I cut for Soul Searcher – the morale-booster – used Mark Mancina’s theme from Speed. Since it was just for cast and crew and wasn’t going on the internet, the copyright thing wasn’t an issue. But these days you’ll definitely want to put your trailer online, so make sure you have the rights to use the music.
If you already have a composer lined up for your film, it may seem logical to have them score your trailer. This is what I did for Soul Searcher’s second trailer, edited primarily for a preview screening at 2004’s Borderlines Film Festival. Unfortunately this didn’t really work. The composer dutifully reflected every little change in the on-screen action. But that’s not how trailer music works. Trailer music needs to be driving and insistent, and should only change moods at two or three carefully planned points. So here’s the tip:
ALWAYS CUT YOUR TRAILER TO MUSIC. Never edit first and try to add music later or have music written to fit.
Watch the Dark Shadows trailer and notice how they use music to pace the edit and underline the transitions. Also note how they punctuate the comedy by stopping the music for the bigs gags, then bring it back in over a reaction shot.
Structure
Everything you need to know about how to edit a trailer can be learnt from simply watching trailers. You’ll notice that they’re structured into well-defined acts, with a key plot point and a change in the music between each act. Like an actual film, the first act will normally set up the world and characters, the second will present a sticky situation and the third will be about trying to resolve that situation, although of course in a trailer no resolution will come.
These days the studio logos tend to be a few shots in, or even at the start of the second act. If you don’t have a motion graphic logo for your production company, now’s the time to sort one out because it won’t feel like a trailer without it.
At the end of the third act will be the title and the “button”. This is a final beat – a sort of exclamation mark at the end of the trailer’s sentence – and is usually comedic. That’s followed by a couple of brief screens of credits (SFMoviePoster is a useful font to get hold of here) and a release date.
Look at the structure in The Dicator’s trailer below: a prelude building mystery, a first act setting up the character, a second act showing the kidnapping predicament, and a third act in which hilarity ensues. Possibly.
Style
Two stylistic things that have been pretty big in trailers for a few years are speed changes and lines over black.
Speed changes work best on tracking or craning shots, and quite simply involve speeding up the first part of the shot for no other reason that it looks kind of cool. Slow motion is used a lot as well, often because you need to emphasise a dramatic point in the trailer more than the director felt was necessary for the film itself. For the same reason, adding a digital zoom-in to a key close-up is quite common.
Running lines of dialogue over a black screen is another emphasis tool. Typically these come at the transition points between acts. We get a montage of shots and music, then everything goes black and silent except for one key line of dialogue, then – BOOM! – a new piece of music kicks in and we’re assailed with moving images once again.
Similarly, fades to black get used a lot in trailers. These can help hide continuity issues caused when you compress a scene, but also aid generally in pacing.
Strobing has become popular lately too – cutting black frames into shots to break them up. It adds pace and makes the viewer feel like they’re not getting to see everything. See the end of this Prometheus trailer for an example.
Text and Voiceovers
Keep these to a minimum. In fact, don’t do a voiceover at all unless you can afford to hire the actual Trailer Voice Guy. Anyone else voicing over your trailer will immediately make it sound amateurish, unless it makes sense for one of the characters in the film to do the VO.
And don’t put your cast’s names up in big letters in your trailer, unless they’re genuine name actors.
Taglines are fine as on-screen text. Check out trailers for films in a similar genre to help you choose a font. There was a time when every trailer had text which moved towards you, with the letters simultaneously separating out. That fad seems to be over now, but look out for things like this in big movie trailers which you can emulate. Dramas and chick-flicks tend to have their captions over a background of out-of-focus points of light – easy enough to shoot with a DSLR and some Christmas lights if you can’t get hold of a stock motion graphic.
Take This Waltz, below, uses this kind of text background.
Sound
Sound is just as phenomenally important in a trailer as it is in any other moving image format. Bad sound can instantly ruin all the hard work you’ve put in to make your trailer look like a “real” trailer.
It can be difficult, especially if you’re cutting your trailer early in post-production. You haven’t done your ADR yet and you don’t even have a post-production sound crew on board.
The solution? Download Audacity – a free piece of audio editing software – and use its noise removal filter on any troublesome production sound. It won’t work miracles, but if you have background noise like traffic, hiss or mains hum it will seriously reduce it. As a side effect you will get digital artefacts, but these will be inaudible once you’ve mixed in your music.
Make judicious use of good sound effects. Get hold of some nice, chunky whooshes to underscore your speed-changes, or your captions zooming on. If your film is a comedy, maybe throw in a record scratch effect when your music jars to a halt for an act change.
Check out the use of loud, whooshy, slammy noises (technical term) in the Men in Black III trailer:
And finally…
In case you somehow missed it, here’s the trailer for my new short film, Stop/Eject:
