Keith M Johnston talks about the origins of the film trailer.

While preparing for a recent talk on trailers at the University of Nottingham, I revisited some old research materials on the early years of the trailer including industry ‘talk’ about the trailer, its value, and its use by exhibitors. After the talk, I received a few questions about trailer history, and those initial years of trailer formation / development. All of which led me to thinking about when the trailer would celebrate its centenary.

Keith J. Hamel’s fascinating exploration of advertising practices of the early 1910s points to various claims that the term ’trailer’ is in circulation as early as 1911. He cites a discussion in The New York Dramatic Mirror that refers to a trailer as a “strip of blank film to attach to the end of a reel”, before considering (and dismissing) propaganda, ‘behind-the-scenes’ films and commercial films of the time period as contenders for the first trailers. (Hamel 2012: 269-70) My Watching the Trailer colleague Fred Greene has also noted the existence of ‘proto-trailers’ such as the addition of a slide to the end of a serial such as The Adventures of Kathleen (1913) prompting audiences to ‘See next week’s thrilling episode.’ (Greene 2013)

Hamel and Greene both discuss ‘a forty-five second strip of film containing three shots’ that promoted the serial The Red Circle (1915). There is some disagreement around their description of that strip of film: Hamel identifies a title slide, then two similar live action images of a hand on which a circle appears (through the use of a dissolve) (2012: 271) while Greene notes the same title slide, but adds a jewelled ring floating in space and the face of star Ruth Roland.​

​​For me, The Red Circle example sits at the intersection of the exhibitor’s use of “series slides” and the creation of “an advance strip of film”, a term used to describe Famous Players’ short film advertising The Quest of Life in 1916. The “series slide” was a set of static glass slides that were used with a projector in a cinema between other parts of the programme. Epes Winthrop Sargent, an ex-Vitagraph publicity man who wrote a weekly column on advertising for The Moving Picture World, claimed that exhibitors that tended to use one simple slide (‘The Smugglers – A Big Three Reel Lupex – Shown Here Saturday’) would be better served by introducing individual elements and narrative across a series of slides. His Smugglers example would then look like:

1. $10, 000, 000 in diamonds
2. And not a cent of duty paid, but
3. Inspector Davis (played by Cecil Coyley)
4. Ran the swindlers down.
5. The Smugglers – here Thursday
6. A Lupex three-part thriller. (Sargent Picture Theatre Advertising 1915, p.55)

 
Series slides could easily add in images – narrative hints or star shots – as well as text, and seem to resemble the broad description of The Red Circle strip of film, with its focus on a developing narrative.
The advance strip of film for The Quest of Life, however, contained ‘one of the famous dances of these Terpischorean stars [dancers Maurice and Florence Walton]’ and was developed ‘in the belief that the screen itself is the best way to advertise motion pictures.’ (Moving Picture World, 30 September 1916, 2094) Here, we have title cards, but also a specific piece of film that seems to act as a free sample of what audiences will see if they watch the feature. And that might be an important point – this advance strip of film was promoting a feature, not the next episode of a serial – which leads me to wonder if we should consider feature promotion as one of the marks of trailer development in this period? To me, while The Quest of Life isn’t quite the trailer format that would dominate in later years, Bioscope’s description of it as giving ‘the public a foretaste of what the photoplay will provide’ does feel like a stronger statement of the potential of the trailer than The Red Circle.
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But, of course, The Quest of Life advance film was never (apparently) referred to as a trailer, and it lacks the montage of excerpted footage that would become a convention through the 1920s and beyond. By July 1917, however, only 10 months after The Quest of Life advance film was released, The Moving Picture World defined the trailer as ‘flashing a few scenes to stimulate curiosity in a coming production’ and that the promotional format had ‘come into use extensively of late’. (MPW 28 July 1917, p. 663)
While Hamel sees this as evidence to support The Red Circle, I think The Quest of Life has a stronger claim: not only is September 1916 more ‘of late’ than 1915, but I believe the link to feature promotion is key. Of course, the quest for the ‘first’ trailer is largely a fruitless task, given the shifting definitions in this period (and partial archiving practice for promotional materials more generally). What is clear from these existing sources is that by July 1917 the industry has accepted the term trailer, and given it a broader definition based around a montage of excerpted footage and title slides.

By 1919, The Exhibitors Herald and Motograph was claiming the trailer to be ‘an old idea’ while accepting its role was to provide ‘a short resume of the coming picture’ (3 August 1919, p35), and the trailer producer National Screen Service was being established in New York to get studios ‘out of the nickel and dime business of selling trailers and posters and stills to individual theatres’ (Lazarus quoted in Johnston 2009, 171). The trailer was an established part of the industry, and has not given up that position since.

So, what does that tell us about the trailer’s 100th birthday?

I would argue it is this year, and that we should be celebrating 100 years of this fascinating and complex coming attraction.

Happy New Year Everyone, I want to kick start this year's blog post by thinking back to December 2013... a time a very special trailer was released. I want within this post, to start honing some initial thoughts about the wider theory of the trailer - that of the paratext. 

As always, comments are very welcome.

Thanks for joining us in 2016!

Ed
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So over the New Year there was a lot of discussion about the new Sherlock episode, which got me thinking about the 'interactive trailer' that aired in 2013. To recap, in December of 2013 to promote the New Years’ episode of Sherlock (The Empty Hearse), the BBC released an ‘interactive trailer’.

This differs from previous incarnations of the trailer that have been conceptualised as short films at a nomenclative and architectural level. Clicking play sets in motion what could be called the horizontal architecture; the trailer plays just like a short film progressing the narrative on the basis of cumulative shorts. Yet this progression has built in interludes that allow for a guided digression. 

So interactive is this trailer that linking to the video is proving very difficult. - You can find it here on the host website however.
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Clicking on these targets (illustrated by the red circle) on the trailer ​, which themselves are guided with captions, brings up a sub-chapter filled with additional short form content.

​In many respects then this trailer has an architecture similar to that of a DVD menu – with a menu screen that runs automatically (in this case the trailer) and with chapter selections that direct you to specific segments (in this case the ‘bonus’ content), these other segments are themselves short films resulting in an interactive narrative that is malleable and divergent from the standard format of the trailer as we know it.

But is this still a ‘trailer’? In departing form the normal format The Sherlock interactive trailer solicits fans’ engagement and actively encourages the click and examine mode of viewing already present in trailer engagement.

So if this is no longer merely a short film, and let us assume for the purposes of this post that its architecture denies this possibility, then do we consider it more of a webpage in its interactive experience. If this is the case how can we understand this form of trailer?

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Trailers have, for the most part been considered as paratexts, those objects that condition our engagement with a central object. Indeed, I would suggest that this concept of the trailer not being the central object, is one of the reasons there are so few scholars in the area. While this trailer retains its promotional qualities - referencing the television event that had (in December 2013) yet to be released, this trailer solicits engagement at an architectural level and can be said to form a stand alone experience - bringing this trailer back into the realms of text, rather than paratext. 

While this trailer-text is still conditioning our engagement with the television show, through both content and architecture that references the detective genre, the act of soliciting engagement and holding it's own hidden content belies the very understanding of the paratext. In short this trailer, through soliciting attention becomes the focus, rather than just an addition to something bigger.

To be fair, when Genette penned his work on paratexts, he was focusing on physical books, including within his work the typography, margins, and titles, but also included interviews with authors, critical reviews, book covers and posters, etc. The point for Genette, appears to be one of audience/consumer goals and intended purpose of these ‘lesser' objects, as consumers we do not pay for the promotional materials, but rather the thing to which it refers which is nearly always sold, this act of referring could be said to create a hierarchy in which one object has more value than another.

I want to suggest, however briefly, that this particular trailer illustrates the problems with the term ‘paratext’ in relation to all trailers. In soliciting our attention within the architecture, the trailer becomes the focus and object or text, and in existing in advance of the TV show, acts metonymically as the show – how often do we see a poster or trailer and decide that the film referenced isn’t for us? In such instances the paratext is standing in for the text becoming the text for those of us who are not interested. Even if we engage with the trailer knowing we will see the object referenced, it becomes stored within our wider textual experience of the show, film, franchise, genre, or body of work of a specific creative professional. In short, surely the act of calling attention to oneself for whatever purpose is the act of creating a text? Here, I want to stop, in part because these ideas need to be fleshed out more, and require the theoretical rigour that belongs in a paper rather than a blog post, but I do want to posit the notion that 
in the case of promotional paratexts, these tend to deny their existence as such through drawing attention however briefly, to themselves. 
 
 

As it's that time of year we thought we'd spread some festive cheer and look forward to the New Year and the new releases. 

While we'll pick up with blog posts in the New Year let's look at some of the fantastic trailers already circulating*

*Trailers chosen here may or may not solely reflect Ed's choices in movie.

I'm really looking forward to Batman V Superman, not only will there be two superheroes, but the whole tone of this trailer looks to be taking the best of the genre together into what promises to be a truly exhilarating film.  

Independence day 2, Ok so the absence of Will Smith here is notable, at least for me, but Goldblum may be able to make up the shortfall. I'm particularly liking the references to the first film and I think that's where the joy lies, but if viewed as a standalone film I suspect this won't be up to much. 

When you think about it, Roald Dahl had some pretty dark stories in the canon, but the BFG here looks like a truly wonderful adaptation of a fantastic adventure (though admittedly it's been a while since I read it). 

Premiering with the Star Wars movie, the Star Trek Beyond trailer is clearly using Star Wars publicity for its own gain, and who can blame them. The music holds the pace of the trailer throughout giving way to a spectacular montage that is ..."just typical", of trailers within this genre and indeed, of mainstream movies with an action element but tropes notwithstanding this is one I hope I'm going to enjoy.

and finally, a spin off of the Harry Potter narrative, Fantastic Beasts once again immerses us in a world of magic and muggles, and this is the basic premise of the trailer here, we are literally invited to return to the fictional universe echoing the narrative introduction of the likes of Don Lafontaine, setting up the narrative premise that will form the backbone of the marketing campaign.


Well those are Ed's 2016 picks and we hope you'll stick with Watching The Trailer through to 2016. In the New Year we've got lots lined up, with conferences in Atlanta, GA lined up, and of course some more results from our survey - we also stride forward with other elements of our Project - but more on that when it happens.


We'd like to extend our thanks to our bloggers and our visitors, and give you all the best wishes for the holidays and 2016. 

From all of us here at the Watching the Trailer Team, have a great holiday wherever you are! 

Keith, Fred, Jennifer, and Ed 

​Star Wars: The Trailer Awakens
In this week’s blog post Keith Johnston looks back on Star Wars trailers we have known and loved. As a film (and franchise) that looms large in narratives of Hollywood, science fiction and the growth of the modern blockbuster, these trailers offer a parallel narrative around the impact and influence Star Wars has had on the ‘coming attraction’ trailer.
 
‘This is where the fun begins’: The first Star Wars trailer is a relatively low-key affair, with less of the bombastic special effects spectacle that would become associated with the franchise. Following many trailer structures of the time, the trailer offers a broad range of sales messages – romance, adventure, broad character and narrative information – with occasional flourishes of a TIE fighter- Millennium Falcon dogfight, or a brief glimpse of a lightsaber duel. Watching from a distance of 40 years, those short bursts of exuberant and fast effects-created fantasy still linger, but aren’t the central draw – perhaps a demonstration of how unsure the studio was in the film’s place or potential. 

Their story didn’t end there!’:

​The teaser trailer for The Empire Strikes Back features no special effects imagery at all. Instead, the teaser displays an array of painted images (by the conceptual artist Ralph McQuarrie) and, towards the end, photographs of the main cast members. The only moving images (in a film series predicated on speed and motion) are the camera flying through a starfield, and moving over the McQuarrie drawings. Here, the lack of visual spectacle is likely a product of 20th Century Fox’s desire to promote the sequel six months ahead of release, well ahead of Industrial Light and Magic having finished all the effects work. Without access to those star effects, the teaser relies on known pleasures and setting up the ultimate anticipation: a confrontation between Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader. By the time the main trailer arrived in cinemas, there were a few more special effects shots on display but the bulk remained practical effects (bounty hunters in costume) rather than space battles (a brief asteroid belt sequence is the main example here). In 1980, for a fuller experience of the special effects spectacle, audiences were better served by various television trailers, which featured a full raft of AT-ATs, the Super Star Destroyer, and the final lightsaber duel.

‘The saga lives on’:
​The teaser for Revenge of the Jedi (1983) is treasured among fans in part because it retains Lucas’ original title for the film, but it also offers the reassurance that a third franchise entry should: recurring characters dominate, but the teaser ends with a montage of space battle sequences that hark back to the first two films (and which these does would be decried as ‘spoiling’ the final Death Star battle). This confidence and nostalgic pleasure (‘return to a galaxy far, far away’) is equally clear in the main trailer, where more finished effects sequences appear, but there is little clear narrative structure. Known visual and emotional pleasures appear to be more important than story.

​‘Now, The Force can be with you…on video’: The use of television is just one of the ways Star Wars promotional trailers have expanded out across new media. In the 1980s, video and cinema releases of the Star Wars films were regularly promoted on VHS cassettes: this included the innovative Widescreen video trailers of the early 1990s which visually highlighted the scope and breadth of the franchise’s imagery. Meanwhile, behind-the-scenes documentaries such as The Making of Star Wars VHS (1980) would become an established part of the 1990s prequel trilogy websites, alongside news, posters, interviews… and trailers. Indeed, the broader shift towards online trailer viewing was heavily influenced by the release of the teaser for Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1999).
 
‘Every generation has a legend…’: On November 17th, 1998, the teaser trailer for The Phantom Menace debuted in selected cinemas across the U.S. Featuring the first new footage from George Lucas’ Star Wars universe since Return of the Jedi, the trailer was described as the most anticipated two minutes of film ever. Yet seventeen years ago, the only place Lucasfilm made the trailer available was in cinemas. Dedicated fans recorded, digitized, and uploaded that teaser online hours after it debuted, and it was shared widely across the internet. Lucasfilm, wrong-footed by the desire for an online version, eventually provided their own – and the teaser broke all previous internet download records, with an estimated 450 Star Wars fans a second downloading the official version. The trailer’s shift to an online distribution model has never looked back, with over 60% of trailer viewing now happening online.

The Phantom Menace trailer features a traditional mix of special effects-led CGI-enhanced sales message – space battles, alien landscapes, lightsaber duels – with teasing central narrative concepts (a first meeting between Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker) but its mythic status is more about the effect it had on the trailer industry, and the rise in fan-led and trailer-driven speculation on what the trailer had ‘revealed’ about the final film. With fan audiences now in control of the trailer – able to rewind, pause, stop and examine in a much more exact way than VHS – speculation and trailer scene breakdowns became a more common aspect of media websites.

​‘Dangerous and disturbing this puzzle is’:

​Acknowledging the desire to interact with a cultural text like a trailer, Lucasfilm targeted that market with a range of trailers for Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones (2002). While teaser ‘Forbidden Love’ focused on the Anakin-Padme love story, the online teaser ‘Mystery’ offered a narrative puzzle rather than a straightforward presentation of narrative. Broad clues are given through glimpses of key locations (Tatooine, Coruscant), key characters (Padme, Obi-Wan), but the trailer relies heavily on a montage of new and strategically familiar images. Barely on screen long enough to register, such shot require and reward the frame-by-frame analysis that The Phantom Menace trailer had been subjected to: Lucasfilm had learned a key lesson in engaging with fans. Litter in clues (a bar fight that seems to echo the original cantina scene; Christopher Lee; an ocean planet; Anakin wreathed in Force lightning) and viewers will unearth them, and then debate them online. The trailer becomes even more layered and complex, designed to be engaged with in this way. Considering the response to the different trailers for Star Wars: The Force Awakens, this theme within trailer viewing has only grown more powerful.
 
(Alongside this activity, of course, fans were now creating their own trailers: an October 2000 trailer purporting to be for Episode 2 featured a particularly epic lightsaber battle that, on closer inspection, was a sequence from Braveheart (1997) with digitally-added lightsabers)

​‘Very dangerous, putting them together’: The trailer for Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith (2005) pulls together almost everything Lucasfilm had learned from its trailer success through the years. A balance of narrative revelation, character moments, and CGI-fueled spectacle alongside brief tantalizing and teasing images (new characters, familiar ships, Chewbacca) to draw in fan audiences willing to excavate this latest promotional material. Like the previous trailers mentioned above, the teaser for this film also explored a new screen for dissemination – an Orange videophone. Indeed, the Episode III teaser was Orange’s most popular video clip in 2005, suggesting and pre-empting the current dominance of smartphones and tablets as trailer viewing devices.
​

 “Chewie, we’re home”: So, what lessons has The Force Awakens trailer campaign learned from previous iterations of this franchise?
 
 
A response by Ed Vollans 
 
We know the campaign is aware of the different forms of audience members form the invested to the casual, and the campaign for The Force Awakens is playing up to all of these through reintroducing characters and themes in very clever ways. TFA trailer has a really interesting blend of old and new, while the CGI spectacle that we see of the earlier films is kept to a fast-paced montage that fleshes out the story world set up in the first minute. By developing the storyline early on, the trailer echoes the previous franchise while gesturing to the sense of uniqueness here. The fast montage towards the end combines the character voice overs and introductions of the first half with some pretty stunning visual effects that lend themselves to being poured over at leisure for further information. At this point CGI technology has developed significantly – allowing an increasingly high definition tablet and smartphone viewing experience to accommodate this kind of close watching. It remains to be seen how well the film will fare at the box office but as far at the trailer goes it combines setting up the story with enough references to existing franchise tropes that echo the by now comparatively low tech CGI of the earlier films with updated renderings that will be certainly prove to be considered as a form of homage to the roots of the franchise. Overall the trailer is bringing back the sense of the spectacle but it’s doing so in a different viewing context, and that’s the key change here. Fans engage on a variety of media forms as well as within a range of different levels of interest  - it may be worth looking at this trailer in comparison to other franchises and seeing if there are any shared elements suggesting a way of referencing the old while bringing in the new.

​For today's post (Nov 13, 2015), Jennifer Gillan, a new ‘Watching The Trailer’ Co-Investigator, weighs in on the appeal and the implications of watching people watch the new Star Wars: The Force Awakens trailer. Jennifer is a Professor in the Creative Industries major at Bentley University in Boston and the author of Television Brandcasting: The Return of the Content-Promotion Hybrid and Television and New Media: Must-Click TV, both from Routledge.
 
Watching the Trailer Watchers

Have you seen the Instagram video posts of Daisy Ridley (Rey) and John Boyega (Finn), the young unknowns in lead roles in Star Wars: The Force Awakens as they react in real time to watching the October 19th trailer?  Have you been watching other videos of people watching the Star Wars trailer or watching trailer commentary videos posted by random fans or organized collectives? A good number of people have been watching, and considering the wide circulation of the videos, it is probably significantly more than the current 32.9K and 25.6K views each official post has accumulated. 

Check out Daisy Ridley via instagram:

 "Staying in a little b'n'b with my friend... Set an alarm to watch the trailer... My friend filmed my reaction. Totally emotional seeing it for the first time and so so so incredibly awed to be part of this incredible legacy #starwars #theforceawakens "

click for Instagram here,​

After I saw these stars-in-the-making trailer reactions, I began clicking around other videos circulating in relation to the trailer. I became one of the 350K+ viewers of  “Is Luke Skywalker a Hero or a Villain?’—a Screen Junkies “Movie Fights” segment on The Force Awakens trailer (October 19th). The fight gets particularly significant between 6:63-14:49.
​

In thinking of video content about Star Wars content, I realized that the popularity of these filmed reactions and post-reaction commentary was a “content about content” category I overlooked in my own work on similar Disney brandcasting. Before turning to an analysis of the “watching the trailer watchers” videos, I want to offer a basic theory about the interconnections among the circulation of and the speculation about trailer content.
 
Inciting the Trailer Speculators

On a formal level, these trailer reaction videos register the trailer editor’s strategy of using decontextualized reaction shots to encourage viewer speculation, a central pleasure of trailer watching. With the penetration of social networking and web engagement behaviors into every day life, Hollywood can bank on viewers’ affiliations with online communities to enable a broad circulation of content and commentary in anticipation of an upcoming film.  Part of the attraction for audiences is connected to the basic pleasures of anticipation. As audiences look forward to an upcoming film, producers trust that they will push forward the trailers and other similar content, and in the process of circulating it, generate awareness and commentary on it.  The social element of this audience behavior creates a linkage between anticipation (pleasurable suspense) and speculation (pleasurable conjecture).
 
To speculate is to anticipate possibilities. Trailer producers must anticipate possible audiences and the appeals that would generate pleasurable suspense. Trailers need to activate pleasurable conjecture, using storytelling and editing to prompt audiences to speculate on various possibilities. In what possible ways might the story unfold? What twists will it take? Does the basic conflict get resolved or is it left open to interpretation? Is the open-endedness only at the midpoint before the culmination in a happy ending? Does the story depend on a different kind of anticipatory pleasure involving speculation on how the story gets to a pleasurably predictable outcome? Trailer producers anticipate which audiences might be interested in which stories, and weigh the possible creative approaches to revealing some of the film’s hooks and holding back others. They consider possible appeals in relation to fictional world, stars, and characterizations.
 
The simultaneity of commentary on the trailer and on the Instgram posts by Boyega and Ridley suggests that certain cultural stories and characterizations continue to have resonance generation after a generation. Current speculation about the characters played by these newcomers have been shaped by expectations set up in the franchise’s first film. In A New Hope, Luke Skywalker’s radical break comes in the classic form of the inciting incident (the death of his only known family), pushing him out of his mundane life and onto the world stage.  Trailer speculators do not know what the new characters’ inciting incidents are, but they expect they will come in the form of loss and displacement (with speculation focused on Rey’s sobbing, Finn’s exploding plane, his surveying glance across an endless desert, which is assumed to be the same one across which Rey treks, with her faithful BB-8 unit at her side).
​

​
Watch me watch Me

Let’s start with some speculation about why so many people accepted the invitation of Daisy Ridley and John Boyega to watch them watch themselves debuting in the new Star Wars trailer. Are we watching to speculate on how we would act in their positions? To discuss how we think someone should act, and to measure the actors’ responses against those values? To reaffirm our belief in the possibility of becoming an overnight sensation and household name? To experience that transition vicariously? To capture an anticipated memory: to see a before-they-were-stars video before the actors were stars? Whatever the motivations for clicking on the videos, the actors’ Instagram accounts accrued a good deal of positive response. Ridley seemed dazzled and gleeful, Boyega like a youth trying to react in a mature, measured way, until he could not contain his excitement. He flipped backwards off the couch, and bounced around the room. Most commentators seemed excited to see videos of actors they hoped were on the cusp of global stardom. Yet, one might also read the actors’ reactions as divided by gender constructions or perhaps seeming too much like star image construction. Whatever the reading, the commentary sections indicated that many of those viewing the videos took some pleasure in talking about the actors’ reactions.
 
My assessment of the significance of this talk about trailers and other people’s reactions to them aligns with Henry Jenkins’ claims about the particular role of gossip in the convergent media industries. In Convergence Culture (2004) Jenkins builds on Deborah Jones’ understanding of gossip as a way to talk about “common experiences, share expertise, and reinforce social norms.” He says that talk about media content is a way to build “common ground between participants.”  It becomes a “way of talking about yourself through critiquing the actions and values of others.” The “talk” on message boards, blogs, and other new media spaces is a form of social interaction. It is always doubling as “talk about the self,” about social norms, and admired character types. The reactions to the reactions of the franchise’s potential breakout stars and the speculation about the characters they play speak to the continuing appeal of one familiar story:  the radical break that transforms the struggling nobody into a major player, whether in Hollywood, in the Star Wars metaverse, or on in the web “content about content” space.
 
Screen Junkies

Let’s turn now to the reactions of the three “combatants” participating in the Star Wars: The Force Awakes “Movie Fight” video posted on the Screen Junkies site (posted above). This trio seemed to share Boyega’s desire to project a mature ability to assess the trailer objectively, but they could not always contain their exuberance about the possibilities of it all. In the specific details of their commentaries, they each revealed emotional investments in elements of the franchise and their memories of earlier films shaped their expectations for the new one. The movie fight video exemplifies some differences in audience investment in the “collective cultural memory” of the Star Wars metaverse.  The term is from Susan Brockus who writes about memories coalescing around cultural objects, and makes a useful distinction between conveyed collective memory—shared across generations—and situated collective memory—shared within a single cohort.
 
Brockus would say that the three “Movie Fight” combatants share a collective cultural memory of Star Wars, but each one has more situated cultural memories, which are often generational as well as personal.  The web segment brought together Dan Murrell, a 32-year old Screen Junkies producer, Scott Mantz and Grae Drake, whose comments suggest they are old enough to have seen some, if not all, the original Star Wars theatrical releases. Mantz is currently affiliated with U.S. television’s Access Hollywood series and Drake is the editor of Rotten Tomatoes, a review aggregator covering film, television, and other media content. They each judge this new trailer watching experience in the context of their expectations of the first trilogy, and the degrees of disappointment they felt in the prequels. We can see this generational frame replicated across trailer commentary, especially by those who watched the first three movies as they were theatrically released.  Murrell shares in this wide-ranging disappointment with the prequels, but his hostility toward them reveals that he also feels shortchanged in a generational sense. The Star Wars of his youth was not the classic Star Wars, and he wants a do-over.
 
Generational Memory: “Getting back to the future”
​
While Murrell was most interested in the trailer’s elements as signs of hope for the future of the franchise, Mantz and Drake had more nostalgic readings. Drake proclaimed that the best moment in the trailer was “not what we saw, but what we heard.” Mantz “got the chills” when he heard the opening notes of the score, which triggered his pleasurable recollections of John Williams’ Han Solo and the Princess theme. This associative process elicited a high degree of anticipation for Mantz, who speculated that the new film could be the next Empire Strikes Back. Drake also experienced a pleasurable memory trigger through sound, tracing her feelings of pleasurable excitement to the sound cue that accompanies the LucasFilm logo. It evoked the original positive associations of Lucas with the wonders produced by Industrial Light and Magic for the initial films. The company pioneered the kind of practical special effects J. J. Abrams chose for the new film instead of the CGI. The director’s speculation is that this choice will help The Force Awakens recapture the magic of the original Star Wars metaverse. The LucasFilm logo and accompanying sound cue was also a memory trigger for Murrell, but it had negative generational associations. In the 32-year-old’s case, it was a recollection of his younger self’s profound disappointment in Lucas’ conceptualization and direction of the prequel trilogy. Murrell’s optimism about the new film stemmed from its direction by Abrams, whom he implied was a reliable brand shepherd able to weave together a new story with the classic Star Wars elements. The trailer evoked these hopes through its parallels of new scenes to remembered scenes, of new characters juxtaposed with older ones or the iconic objects standing in for them.  With some nostalgia born of the fact that the first trilogy screened before his time, Murrell concluded that the trailer gave him hope that Star Wars would finally be “getting back to the future.”
 
Brockus would take these responses to “Watching the Trailer” as evidence that the film had become a cultural object that had taken root in collective memory and in more situational memories related to generational or personal experiences. Their original anticipation for the earlier movies and memories of watching and assessing them against expectations impacts their anticipation for the upcoming viewing experience.  It seems that what we are watching when watching these trailer watchers is the attachment of meanings to the trailer beyond the meanings inherent in it, thereby giving it affective value. Through this kind of annotated circulation trailers and other content about content acquire more value. When links to this content appear broadly across social networking sites and utilities, on aggregator and commentary sites, the content becomes part of the new media economy leveraged by global media companies and brands.
 
I hope that I have offered several discursive frames through which to read watching trailer watchers. I may simply have offered a rather long-winded annotation of the annotated circulation of the new Star Wars trailer. So the cycle continues . . .
 
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Brockus, Susan. “Where the Magic Lives: Disney’s Cultivation, Co-Creation, and Control of America’s Cultural Objects.” Popular Communication: The International Journal of Media and Culture 2.4 (2009): 191-211.
 
Gillan, Jennifer. Television Brandcasting: The Return of the Content-Promotion Hybrid. New York: Routledge, 2015.
 
Jenkins, Henry. Containment Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press, 2004.
 

 For today's post (Oct 28th, 2015), we're honored to share insights from a busy entertainment copywriter.  Ron Geiger is a writer and branding specialist with over 17 years experience giving voice to the biggest brands in entertainment.  He has contributed to campaigns for over 100 movies, over 100 TV shows and over 70 TV networks.  His clients have included Universal Studios, 20th Century Fox, Time Warner, Dreamworks, The Weinstein Company, Netflix, YouTube, DIRECTV, ABC, CBS, FX and USA.  Clients outside the entertainment industry have included Target, Mattel, Toyota, Lexus, Canon, Intel and King James Beats.  Ron’s work also appeared on giant screens at the National Mall in Washington D.C. during the historic inauguration of Barack Obama.  As a friend of our project, we thought he might enjoy the challenge of writing more than a few perfect words at a time.   You can find him on Twitter: @rongeiger
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​I sell entertaining experiences. 
 
Laugh-out-loud.  Edge-of-your-seat.  Heart-warming.  Even news-worthy.  We still call them movies and TV shows for now, but more and more of the content I sell can be experienced on any screen.  That’s why movie studios and TV networks are starting to call themselves “content platforms.”  It’s a pretty dry term, but definitions in the Age of Netflix and YouTube are very much in flux.
 
My official job title is freelance copywriter, and I’ve worked on hundreds of advertising campaigns for different kinds of “content.”  (See why I call them “experiences”?)   There’s a whole industry of entertainment branding and promotion companies competing to capture your attention.  So every time you see a trailer or ad, you’re seeing the “winner” of many creative battles, for better or worse.  
 

Anywhere is possible.
 
This is one of mine.  A single line that made it through the marketing bureaucracy gauntlet to lead the campaign for Jumper, a sci-fi movie put out by 20th Century Fox a few years ago.  It has an aspirational, almost dream-like quality that fits well with the movie’s concept, but it’s also a spin on a cliché (“anything is possible”), so it has some built-in potential to stay with you.  This is the kind of gold I pan for.  Something that sticks, because it speaks to you on an emotional level.  But make no mistake, it all starts from a very rational place.
 
 
The Position
 
By the time I come on board, a marketing team inside the studio/network/content platform has already made some key choices about how to brand their property.  
 
How are we positioning it?  That is, how do set this apart from the other entertainment options in the marketplace.  Is it the most intense action thriller of the summer?  Or an action adventure with a shocking twist?  Are the stars big enough to headline the campaign?  Or is the story the star?  Is the concept so clever and catchy that it sells itself?   What themes are we avoiding?  Who’s the target audience? 
 
That last one is the key for me.  I have to know who I’m speaking to before I know what to say.
 
For studio movies, the target audience is usually pretty broad.  They give me traditional demographic info like “Adults 18-44.  Male skew.  Fans of ______ genre.”  For TV shows, demographics are just the beginning.  Audiences are often grouped by shared behaviors and attitudes which they call “psychographics”.  Like “Pop Culture Aficionados” or “Adventure Addicts.”  
 
Once I can picture the audience, I can start to experiment with language and concepts, looking for the best new ways to introduce them to this new experience. 
 
The process starts the same for trailers, commercials, print ads, billboards, packaging copy, you name it.  Then, the specific needs of the media determine what comes next. 
 
 
Trailer Structure
 
My favorite way to structure a trailer has three parts.  I’ve never really given these parts a name, but you’re my target audience now, so I imagine that what I say will have more sticking power if I chose something more clever than 1-2-3.  How about...
 
The Hook.  The Jam.  The Tease.
 
 
The Hook
 
The first moments of a trailer are crucial.  The movie has to feel new to get your attention, but not too new.  We’re trying to grab you, but also ground you in a genre.  It’s okay to laugh.  It’s the perfect time to scream.  
 
We only have a couple of minutes here, so the trailer needs to form a bond between you and the lead character(s).  Fast!  That’s why stars and genres are so effective.  They’re shortcuts to familiarity.  Heuristics.  Ten seconds of Tom Cruise doing Tom Cruise things and your mind has enough information to set some emotional expectations.  You see Tom Cruise performing a crazy, new stunt and you’re not only promised excitement, but also safety.  You and Tom go way back, and the genre of his story goes back even further.  So now you’re ready to let down your guard – and that’s when the fun begins.
 
 
The Jam
 
There’s no faster way to your heart – my heart, every heart – than danger.  Someone fascinating is about to face the challenge of a lifetime.  A forbidden love.  A ruthless villain.  You know the drill. 
 
The narrative shorthand that has evolved over tens of thousands of years of storytelling comes in pretty handy when time is so limited.   But this is isn’t the first time your mind has been down the path of forbidden love.  After The Hook has grabbed your attention, the accountant in your head starts checking off allowable plot points as they roll out.  “Okay...  Okay...  Nope, not buying that.”  Uh-oh... we’re in trouble.  Quick – blow something up!
 
To prevent your mind from getting stuck on a detail, trailers include the least amount of information possible.  We need just enough for your mind to check the “That’s different, but not too different” box.  (Unless of course, you belong to the “Novelty Seeker” psychographic, then strange is job one.)
 
We may only be a minute into this trailer and you’re already unplugging from your life and plugging into his/hers... and now you’re in a Jam!   This is the “How the hell am I ever going to make it out alive?!” box.  For this isn’t really a Tom Cruise movie, it’s a you movie.  Remember, I’m selling you an experience.  And even if the experience doesn’t rise to the operatic level of action movies, the funny/romantic/inspirational life that you’re joining has to be threatened enough to get you emotionally engaged. 
 
 
The Tease
 
The whole point of the trailer is to build you up, then leave you hanging.  Will Tom Cruise make it out alive?  Will Romeo and Juliet live happily ever after? 
 
I really wish I could tell you... but you’ll just have to see for yourself.   
 
Of course, there’s this big Tease happening on screen now that’s dismissed the accountant in your head and put your heart in charge.  You’re seeing brief snippets of all the best scenes in the movie getting faster and faster and more dangerous for Tom.  The sheer kinetic energy of the quick cuts is designed to leave you breathless, but if it’s not done right, then it will leave your mind as soon it leaves the screen.  The very definition of smoke and mirrors.
 
Successful trailers leave you with a lingering desire for more, because the experience echoes with your own desires.  “I knew it... anywhere is possible!”  While the “Shock Hunter” psychographic may want new for new sake, the rest of us are actually looking for entertainment that fits within our own worldview.  The job of the trailer is to show how this movie will take you to that corner of your world that you haven’t experienced – without really asking you to risk anything.  It’s just play, right?
 
So, is my job simply to pander to the target audience?  Or am I really trying to reflect something meaningful about them back to them?
 
Are trailers just confirmation bias on cinematic steroids?  Or is each attempting to add something new to a larger dialogue between the people who create motion pictures and the people who experience them?
 
I really wish I could tell you... but you’ll just to see for yourself.
 

This fortnight, Watching the Trailer is proud to present, Dr Leora Hadas, University of Nottingham, welcome Dr Hadas, thanks for contributing! 
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​On August 19th, 2013, J. J. Abrams and Bad Robot Productions sent a ripple of curiosity and rumour through the internet with the release of a minute-long video entitled “Stranger”. While the video was referred to as a trailer, it did not offer any hints as for what it was a trailer for – a new film, television show, or an existing Bad Robot project. It was only on September 9th, along with the release of a follow-up 1:45 minute video, that “Stranger” was revealed as a trailer for, of all things, a book – S., billed as “From J. J. Abrams, written by Doug Dorst”. 
​

It would be difficult to call the S. trailers unusual, considering that, as this blog has previously discussed there is really no “usual” when it comes to book trailers. But they are unusually cryptic, which is as par course for Bad Robot and Abrams. In fact, as far as I am aware, the S. trailers were the first to use specifically the trailer, or trailer-like form (as opposed to something like an ARG or website) in advertising a media product without any indication of its medium.  Coming as I do from the background of researching media authorship, I found it particularly interesting that 
this came from J. J. Abrams, who continues to be renowned for his work in multiple media. I would, in fact, argue that part of the function of creating the trailers for S. was the establishment of Abrams’ author brand in the new medium of the book.
​

​Chief of those is the suggestion of a conspiracy, for example in the narration telling the viewer that “men are erased” and that “it’s all true, everything he wrote”, as well as in the evocation of a mysterious “they” who are “coming”.  The appearance of suited men with flashlights implies those men as the classic Men in Black of conspiracy fiction, while the horror elements – the man with his mouth sewn shut, the traces of bloodied fingerprints – establish the association with the supernatural and with forbidden knowledge, all of which align S. with similar themes and storytelling style in Bad Robot productions Alias, Lost, and Fringe. The audience address of the narration, and the calling of attention to the medium suggest a connection with previous Abrams trailers for Super 8 and Cloverfield. Such recurring stylistic and thematic elements are highlighted not only to link the works of the author together, but to create an overall brand that exists beyond the oeuvre, into an overall philosophy and identity that Abrams continues to construct in non-specific publicity, such as his TED talk.

I would in fact suggest that the S. trailers have a further function regarding authorship. S. is Abrams’ first foray into literature – a medium that was, in effect, the birthplace of Romantic ideas of authorship. Romantic auteurism is a legitimating discourse, one which was utilized to create the idea of film, and later television, as an art form.2 In assuming the mantle of author in its more traditional literary sense, Abrams is taking something of a risk, particularly since he did not himself write S. “From J. J. Abrams, written by Doug Dorst” is a popular sell in spin-off or tie-in media; not so much in original literature. The trailers for S. act to establish the possibility of Abrams as a literary author. They adapt the tropes of the “mystery box” creative signature to the medium, and create a kind of alignment between the mysterious author character in the book itself, and Abrams himself as a mysterious author. The use of blank and scattered pages, the clicking of the typewriter, and a Plato quote to create the sense of mystery and horror, and the focus on the book as a physical “mystery box”, effectively speak to Abrams’ ability to work in the new medium and bring in his creative signature. The trailer thus serves a dual purpose. The presence of books, writing, and the mystery author in the trailer act to give the audience some clues regarding its themes and content, yet this choice of focus, which elements to reveal and which to obscure, also work to frame and mediate Abrams’ authorship.

The trailer’s final tagline, “the book is just the beginning”, invites audiences to make the link between S. and Abrams’ broader transmedia brand, reminding us that the S. trailers are not book trailers as such. The immediate media product advertised may be a book, yet the Abrams/Bad Robot connection brings the trailer in itself into its own space, as an act of showmanship and active blurring of boundaries between media. The studio and author are not simply advertising a product, but making a statement of their media omnipresence. In considering the book trailer as an evolving form, and the role of trailers in establishing promotional authorship, the S. trailers serve as an excellent milestone. 
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1 “J. J. Abrams: The Mystery Box,” TED Talks video, 18:02, posted by “TED2007,” January 2008, http://www.ted.com/talks/j_j_abrams_mystery_box.html.  

2 See Shyon Baumann, “Intellectualization and Art World Development: Film in the United States,” American Sociological Review 66(3) (2001), and Michael Z. Newman and Elana Levine, Legitimating Television: Media Convergence and Cultural Status (New York: Routledge, 2012).

​One of the first comments to the ‘Interstellar  Russian trailer’ reads as “рашка такая 
рашка”, which can be translated as “Russia is so Russia”. However, instead of using the word “Russia”, the user has chosen a slighting word “Russka”, which is a derogatory slang word derived from the word “Russia”, which Russians use when describing Russia’s problems, and particularly when the media highlights an unfavourable aspect of Russian life. This comment is interesting, as it has set the tone for the following discussion, with many users using the word “Russka” in the following comments. One user commented: “People make the country. Those who live in Russka are ashamed of it, and those who live in Russia are proud of it”, indicating a painful contradiction felt by many Russians, who simultaneously love and hate, are proud and ashamed of their own country and fellow citizens.. Some of the comments are also highly sarcastic, with users writing things like “Glory to the great Russia!” or “This video is very thought provoking… It made me think about how many idiots we have in this country!” 

However, it is not only the comments, but the footage itself that can be seen as offering a social and political critique. Russian trailers appear to address social issues, such as lack of laws and rules or their total disregard, alcoholism, unemployment and underdevelopment of many areas outside big cities and people who occupy them, who lack education, culture and have no work prospects, which often links back to alcoholism, making it a vicious circle of social inequality and injustice. The videos also often address other peculiarities of Russian life, such as extreme weather conditions, for instance, and what people have to do to cope with them, often on their own, with no support from local councils. The images below from the Interstellar - Russian trailer illustrate this further:

Russian trailers are a mash up of footage taken from multiple sources, united and structured by the conventional cinematic trailer format and a dramatic soundtrack, which is always a voiceover borrowed from an official trailer for a specific film (official trailer for the Russian market, where the original English trailer is translated and adopted into Russian). The format of the trailer works very well for such mash up: best bits of amateur footage are montaged in the fast-paced manner, being brought together to tell a story, however, similar to critiques of cinematic trailers, these stories are quite vague, without giving too much away (cf Johnston, 2008).

The choice of films is not accidental either, the voiceover is usually uniquely linked to the theme and tone of the video, helping to develop the narrative and make sense of the onscreen action. To demonstrate this on the example of Interstellar Russian Trailer, the voiceover is the following (in Russian): “We've always defined ourselves by the ability to overcome the impossible. And we count these moments. These moments when we dare to aim higher, to break barriers, to reach for the stars, to make the unknown known. We count these moments as our proudest achievements. But we lost all that. Or perhaps we've just forgotten that we are still pioneers. And we've barely begun. And that our greatest accomplishments cannot be behind us, because our destiny lies above us”. The connection of the voiceover, which is also a quote from the main character in the film from – Cooper, was strongly felt by some viewers, with one YouTube user saying: “We were proud of Gagarin going to space, the WWII victory, the beauty of our boundless motherland… What is happening, what is all this?” The voiceover thus ties all of the videos together and gives them a meaning; the video can be analysed as posing a rhetorical question of what can Russians be proud of now, when all the accomplishments of the Soviet Union are being left far behind, with only social inequalities, poverty and unruliness remaining in their place. However, the way this question is posed is very subtle, it is hidden behind the seemingly obvious image, and is not apparent to everyone, which makes these ugly videos uniquely poetic.

Works cited:

Jenkins, Henry (2006) Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press

Johnston, Keith M. (2008) ‘‘The Coolest Way to Watch Movie Trailers in the World' Trailers in the Digital Age’. Convergence, Vol. 14(2), pp. 145-160

Williams, Kathleen Amy (2012) ‘Fake and fan film trailers as incarnations of audience anticipation and desire’. Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol. 9, available at: http://journal.transformativeworks.com/index.php/twc/article/view/360/284 [Accessed on 21/09/2015]

This fortnight’s post is very much a work in progress, and comes from Ed's (hopefully) forthcoming conference paper currently under work in collaboration with colleague Ksenia Frolova, at the University of East Anglia.


In this post, though I want to briefly talk about Fan trailers, and the definition of fan trailers. Specifically however, I want to explore as best I can, the emerging phenomena that are, ‘Russian Trailers’. So before I begin, I need a hefty caveat: my Russian language skills are not good, in fact they're almost non-existent and this research is done purely at a theoretical and somewhat superficial level until my Russian speaking colleagues are able to contribute to the project, but not being one to shy away from a challenge here are some thoughts so far.

Identified as ‘Русский трейлер’ or Russian Trailer, these short films are appearing across YouTube and appear to be real world footage edited together to replicate editing and communicative conventions of specific film trailers. 

Titles include:

Интерстеллар : Русский трейлер /Interstellar - Russian trailer

Война миров Z : Русский трейлер / World War Z – Russian trailer    

Tитаник : Русский трейлер/ Titanic - Russian trailer

Across these forms are the conventions of fan made trailers, use of studio logos to set up a trailer, voice overs taken straight from 'authentic' trailers, on some rare occasions even the modifying of footage from the source film. Yet the overwhelming unifying characteristics of these trailers are a titular reference to a movie Titanic, World War Z, etc and the use of themed real world footage to compose the 'trailer'. 

That these trailers appear on YouTube itself can be said to hold most of the traits of the fan made trailer, and indeed as we'll see videosharing is at the heart of these trailers. 


Overall the connections between the trailer and the Russian trailer can be difficult to explain so let me illustrate:

On the left, we have the Official Trailer for Interstellar, on the right, we have the Russian Trailer.

(NB, the trailer on the right has an English language Voice-over, though this link does not  it would be interesting to know what if any differences there are between the two Russian Trailers, they are both identical in terms of the footage used.

We can see even at this early stage of research a unilateral connection between these ‘fan’ trailers and the film industry trailers. There appears to be a borrowed set of conventions, and the links with the title alone are enough to frame the 'real world' footage in a new manner. Yet there is a sense of technology, and human endeavour dominating the Russian Trailer, in keeping with the themes of the movie Interstellar.

Ok so 'Russian Trailers' are a phenomenon, great... but taking this study further poses a linguistic and archival challenge. Are these ‘fan made’ Russian trailers replicating an 'authentic' Russian movie trailer with real world footage, - given the image of man spinning on a wheel (52 seconds in), this seems unlikely.  So how do we understand these trailers?

Though despite looking I am unable to find any verified Russian trailers for the movies in question. We know that Trailers are tailored for international audiences and that this means different footage may appear in different marketing campaigns; as an article in Sight & Sound in 1998 points out and as a quick comparison of national marketing campaigns may indicate trailers posters and even stars are constructed in different ways for different markets, yet these trailer don't seem to be the typical fan trailer - re-editing an existing work to subvert it.  These Russian Trailers are typically taking previously existing footage, notably it seems to come from a predominantly Eastern perspective based on language cues from road signs to dialogue. Yet on some occasions there appears to be a replication of specific film trailers, other times not which brings into question how we define ‘fan trailers’. Consider the Titanic Trailer in relation to Interstellar, the connections between Titanic and it's Russian Counterpart seem to be strong at a thematic level if nothing else while the Interstellar connection seems more tenuous at least to this 'casual' observer removed from cultural context.

Presumably the connection between these Russian Trailers and the Film Trailers is more than just a name (or why else would such a connection be made) but without understanding the context of the images and indeed, understanding the dialogue I can make no further comment here on their content, but perhaps it's useful to consider the how we might go about defining them. 

These are not trailers selling nor promoting any product in a conventional sense, so we can exclude them from the canon of industry originating trailers. 

They are clearly referencing existing trailers and movies so we could consider them, as Bridget Kies writes in her blogpost, as a fan response to the industry but instead of subverting existing materials directly through re-editing or splicing, or pre-empting forthcoming trailers with one of their own, these Russian trailers sit somewhere in the middle: creating an entirely new discontinuous narrative from real-world footage. So despite neither mashing up, nor attempting to be an authentic trailer, these trailers exist within the cultural cinematic context of specific movies; much like a Fan-made trailer, as Kathleen Williams writes. Yet these trailers appear not to be 'articulations of audience desire' for a specific movie, rather, the movie provides a theme by which a compilation is made, making these instead a celebration of collective knowledge of both a film's broad narrative and thematic construct on the one hand, of technical expertise in editing, and Russian Video culture on the other. It seems to me, albeit in my limited knowledge of context that these trailers are celebratory in nature, drawing thematic connections between videosharing culture through real world footage and the wider context of the film itself forms the purpose, which sits somewhere in middle of the wider discussions of fan-made trailers. 

Yet, the reliance on what appears to be Russian footage, (I am reliably informed by my Russian Speaking colleagues this is broadly the case) surely has some form of political message within it, even it is in the form of a celebration of Russian video culture. So do we consider these trailers to be a form of social or political commentary? 

It is possible then that object of Fandom here is Russian Video culture itself, and/or the film being linked but without further study (and an improved knowledge of Russian) it is nearly impossible to tell. 
 
It is clear, however that significantly more work is needed if I'm to understand these trailers but for now enjoy Step Up 3D - Russian Trailer -    Шаг вперед 3D - Русский трейлер. 

’ Coming soon to a theatre near you’,  ‘Online theatre trailers - lost the plot?’

At the end of the first decade of the new millennium, theatre critics like those linked above started quite loudly acknowledging (well… mostly lamenting) the presence of a new form of promotional material for stage theatre: the theatre trailer. Despite theatre trailers ranging back as far as the start of the film industry, and existing during the development of the film trailer itself, as far as some critics were concerned: this was a new phenomenon, shaking the foundations of theatre*.  
*presumably this hype was also to generate traffic to blogs and sites, so let’s take it with a pinch of salt – for now.

This somewhat frosty reception says a lot about how elements of the industry saw theatre defined or constructed in relation to film (if you’re interested in this debate check out Philip Auslander's discussion of liveness, here). Tied up with the rise of live-streaming to cinemas and emerging from a similar context (check out Martin Barker’s fantastic book on the topic), theatre trailers now form a key part of audience engagement for amateur and professional, big and small companies alike. It’s now common to see theatre companies running their own YouTube channels, and if you go to a cinema you’re quite likely to see something for a live theatre event. So theatre isn't clearly-divided from film (nor would I suggest it ever has been when we consider the history of the film industry).

The point, in short, is that  theatre trailers like book trailers and videogame trailers are a 'thing', a cultural phenomenon. This phenomenon pushes into crisis the broad (and very problematic) popular definition of a trailer as a selection of clips or highlights from a movie. These theatre trailers are essentially short films, sometimes shot as short films, other times made up of recorded theatre (which potentially...makes it a film?). What follows then, are some initial findings of theatre trailers and a brief exploration of their aesthetics broadly adapted from my recent PhD thesis (available via all good libraries with a bit of searching). 


In many respects the broad categories of theatre trailers I've identified in this blog post have now been surpassed by the development of the industry and so these categories need to be treated with caution but they demonstrate two things: firstly that theatre trailers exist within a 'trailer format' and secondly that are capable and in the process of developing their own style, and this could potentially be used to help us define and understand exactly what a film trailer could look like within the broadest sense of a definition either through including theatre trailers in the category of trailers in general, or through rejecting them, and therein highlighting boundaries. 

The first kind of aesthetic identified is at it's heart 'recorded theatre', the camera remains static perhaps replicating the experience of the in-house audience seated, unable to fly through the air in fantastic close-ups or to use overhead shots editing is often ellipsis, if used at all. Here it's very easy to see the performance space highlighted as such within the frame, sometimes with audience members visible in the foreground this kind of aesthetic might remind you of home videos of school theatre productions and while technically less skilled in the creation process this kind of trailer gets right to the heart of the matter; there can be little doubt this is stage theatre. This aesthetic seems to be popular with smaller stage productions as well as being used in early theatre trailers after the turn of the millennium.

The second kind of aesthetic, and it seems to be less popular within the theatre industry, could be called the cathartic event: this largely consists of audience interviews with little to no footage of the performance itself, audiences and creator address the camera and emphasise through dialogue the ‘live experience’, it’s the trailer equivalent of a friend telling you about a movie they’ve seen. In short this is a trailer that unlike the stage world of 'recorded theatre' (that emphasises ‘theatre-ness’ and ‘theatricality’), avoids the ‘free sample’ aesthetic in favour of mystery and an unknown experience being conveyed to the audience through celebrity and audience endorsement. In this respect however this trailer could be said to be the counterpart to press junkets, to gala premier footage, yet it still operates under the label 'trailer' which shatters the concept of a theatre trailer at least, having to display the performance directly.

And finally, by far the most popular, thanks to big players like the RSC, the ENO and the NT, we have the short film aesthetic. Within such a format the performance space takes on a diegetic world in which there is less emphasis on the onscreen audience, the action is set on a stage, or a real world environment but attention is not drawn to it as with the stage aesthetic – you’d have to really focus on the background to see audience members for example. Within this there is little to no discernible performance space, and often indications of it being theatre are confined to the end of the trailer.

Here we see it integrates direct character address to construct a narrative, with the close ups of the body rather than the performance space: it avoids overtly suggesting ‘theatre’. Editing features strongly in creating a sense of a narrative in contrast to the Stage World aesthetic that presents large sections, while it lacks establishing shots and the conventions of Hollywood, you could be forgiven for initially thinking this is a film.

These are broad aesthetics and the ‘ideal type’ that I’ve listed here, but they serve a purpose; to orientate discussion of theatre on screen in an age of media convergence. Despite early criticism from those in the media there are some (in my opinion) fantastic trailers out there, and the ways of presenting theatre as an industry, and individual products within it, offer the opportunity to explore theatre’s identity on screen.

Ed's post this week, originally featured on the 'And now....from Norwich' Blog with minor changes therein, and we thank the 'And now...' team for permission to repost.