Machinima for Dummies: Trailers and Machinima

Trailers and Machinima

Hugh "Nomad" Hancock — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 15:46:00 +0100

I’ve been thinking about trailers - as you do.

(Well, actually, if you’ve got a feature film coming out that took four years of your life to make, yes, you do!).

Now, I and other Machinima creators have tended to go one of two ways with trailers:

Release them well before the release of the film, usually whilst you’re still in production or,
Don’t have one.

Option 1) is definitely a bad idea. For starters, if you’re still developing the look of the film, your trailer won’t be as slick as your finished product - and your trailer should ideally be the slickest element of your film package. Secondly, no-one ever gets their time estimates right on a Machinima product, for the same reasons that no-one ever gets the time estimates right on software development - too many variables, too much variance. That means that your trailer will come out months and months before your film, in all likelihood - giving people time to forget it.

(I’ll have a piece up on scheduling and estimating Machinima production at some point, but the summary is “don’t if you can help it”.)

At best, a trailer beforehand might help build up some anticipation, but it isn’t guaranteed - and worst case, you’ll actually convince people that your production quality will be lower than it is.

(We speak from experience. The BloodSpell trailer was not well timed.)

Option 2) is a common one, but it’s also not a good idea if your film’s more than about five minutes long. Just as there’s a steep cut-off point for download sizes (a 10 Mb download will attract 5-10 times the number of downloaders as a 100 Mb download), I’m fairly sure that there’s also a cut-off point beyond which people won”t experiment with a long film. I’m not sure what it is, yet, and I think that it’s longer than you might expect, but it’s there - particularly with an unknwon quantity.

And yet, the reluctance to download or watch goes away if you’ve got a track record. Brandon “Oxhorn” Dennis, for example, recently released a 12-minute film, the third in his “Inventing Swear Words” series - longer than I’d normally expect a peak-popularity film. However, he’s getting remarkable figures - 83,000 views in the first week.

So why trail? Because it gives people a “teaser” work to get some idea of the quality they can expect. Given that even if you’re a prolific Machinima creator, there will always be new people coming to your films, having some kind of short work is a good way to go - and having a trailer, particularly if you update it for each part in a series, say, is a good way to ensure that the first part of your work that they watch is the best (a critical problem that we had with the original BloodSpell series - Episode 1, being the first one we made, was by far the weakest episode).

But again, when to release the trailer? Well, taking everything into account, it’s seeming to me that the best time to release a trailer is at exactly the same time as you release your film. It provides a “proof of concept” as mentioned above. It provides a quick way for lazy or harried media types to get a sense of whether you’re worth bothering with. And it hopefully ensures that curious people arriving at your site but not wanting to dive straight into a long piece will look at a recent work full of your best efforts, rather than hunting around for a shorter film you’ve made (which was probably earlier and therefore worse).

We’re going to be trying this approach for BloodSpell. We’ll see how it goes.

"Trailers and Machinima" by Ross "Editgasm" Bambrey

Mon, 08 Oct 2007 12:08:56 +0100

Aaargh trailer…

you know I still have nightmares where I wake up jibbering “dung dung duhdung dung dung duhdung…”

gief preview when you have a first cut I’d like to see what you have and offer some constructive crits. (I promise they won’t be like the ones from the first trailer ;) )

"Trailers and Machinima" by Hugh "Nomad" Hancock

Thu, 04 Oct 2007 17:19:40 +0100

The Gravatar thing will get sorted whenever I remember to get new publicity pics. You know, like, a long time from now.

I joke. I’ll sort it when I sort out my Digg account in a few days.

"Trailers and Machinima" by Johnnie Ingram

Thu, 04 Oct 2007 17:11:18 +0100

Yup, the original BloodSpell trailer was quite … unique. And when you think of the caffeine-and-pizza-fueled all-nighter that we pulled to get that out …

Hugh, get yourself a Gravatar for gawd’s sake.

"Trailers and Machinima" by Hugh "Nomad" Hancock

Thu, 04 Oct 2007 16:53:39 +0100

I’m very curious to see how well the BloodSpell trailer does, because I think it’s the first time a Machinima producer (or maybe a free long-form media producer of any kind) has tried to use a trailer like this.

Of course, that does now mean that a chunk of my marketing time is now earmarked toward marketing the trailer, which all gets a bit meta…

"Trailers and Machinima" by Overman

Thu, 04 Oct 2007 16:16:02 +0100

Better that than my approach with Father Frags Best… a trailer 7 years after the release of the film. LOL

I think trailers are a powerful medium to generate interest, when people avoid the pitfalls you mentioned. Another goal worth mentioning is finding that right balance between generating intrigue and giving away too much about your story. Because for me, the only thing worse than a trailer which is so obscure I find myself going “Do I even know what that movie is about?” is the other extreme - feeling like I’ll likely not be surprised by anything in the film because they’ve revealed too much.

Hollywood has been doing trailers for how long now, and they still don’t get it right every time. In the fifties and sixties, it wasn’t uncommon for the trailer to give away literally EVERYTHING about the major plot points - that was the philosophy back then, that people want to know what to expect. Thankfully, that time has passed, but I sometimes think those old tendencies creep into trailers nowadays. Some old habits die hard, even when they are transgenerational.