Trailer competition details
Call in sick, ignore your loved ones, and put on a pot of coffee: the trailer competition for The Nines begins today.
The delay in staging the competition has probably led to some over-thinking: What about people who haven’t seen the movie? What about film school students? What about people who are actually video editors for a living — is it fair for them to compete?
Allow me to recontextualize a bit.
This is the video equivalent of one of the scene challenges I occasionally throw on the site. Given the same criteria — and in this case, the same clips — the goal is to see who can come up with the coolest, slickest, strangest and/or most awesome piece of digital video. You may be using Final Cut instead of Final Draft, but the instinct is the same. It doesn’t matter who you are, or whether you’ve seen The Nines yet. If you have a good idea (and/or mad editing skillz), you should compete.
Like the Scene Challenges, the prize here is bragging rights. In addition, I’ll be congratulating the winners at our big debut screening in Austin on September 28th.1 I’ll even play the trailers if we can get DVD’s in time.
There are two categories for the competition:
1. Best Pure Trailer
By “pure,” I mean that all of the footage used in creating the trailer comes from the clips provided. You can mangle them, run them backwards, or color-correct them to obscurity. You can throw in titles, motion graphics, and other user-created content. But you can’t mix in footage from Donnie Darko or The Magnificent Seven. Because that’s for the other category…
2. Best Mash-Up Trailer
All those things you couldn’t do in the other category? You can do them. If you want to grab the nuclear explosion from The Sum of All Fears, go for it. This isn’t an invitation for flagrant copyright violation, but rather an urge to explore the boundaries of creative fair use. There’s no commercial aspect to any part of this competition, and if YouTube (or whoever) lets you post it, that’s good enough for our purposes.
Speaking of YouTube, that’s a pretty obvious place to let the world (and the judges2) see your work. Simply include “thenines” (one word) as a tag, to help us find it. But you’re also welcome to post wherever else you want — MySpace, Zannel, etc.
No matter where you post it, be sure to leave a link to it in the forums at lookforthenines.com. That’s where we’ll making our list of trailers to check out.
I expect that most people will use music from their favorite films and bands. Again, the YouTubes of the world seem to be just fine with this. 3
The official trailer for The Nines plays as a sort of thriller. Feel free to ignore this tone. Just as you can turn The Shining into a comedy, you can do pretty much anything with The Nines.
I’m sure there will be more questions in the comments, so keep checking back as I add updates to this article. And check the forums at lookforthenines for other suggestions from competitors. But for now, get downloading.
Downloading
There are 120 clips, with an average length of about four seconds each. The longest is 0:28, shortest is 0:01. It’s pretty raw footage — you’ll hear me yelling “Cut!” and shouting off-camera interview questions. Erik Beeson, who helped get the footage online, feels that the winners will be the ones who do the best job with audio editing. I disagree. I think the winner will be the one with the best original idea, and decent execution.
There are two versions of footage to choose from: DV and MPEG-4. The DV is big and beautiful. The MPEG-4 is small and nimble — and not as bad as you’d think. Both are available by torrent:4
Here’s the deal: If you’re using the torrents, you have to help seed. That means keeping your client open after you finish downloading, so others can share.
If all this talk of torrents scares you, there is also a directly-downloadable version of the MPEG-4 footage:
If anyone else wants to mirror for a day or two, I’d be much obliged. Leave a note in the comments.
The Deadline
All entries need to be online and viewable by 6:00 a.m. PDT Tuesday, September 25th.
Keep checking back
There will be refinements and clarifications, I’m sure. Leave questions in the comments section, and I’ll address them as soon as I can.
Good luck!
- Ryan and I will be there for a Q&A. Tickets are on sale now at the Alamo Drafthouse. ↩
- The judges being me and some other recruited folks from the movie. ↩
- The one sad scenario I can imagine is if someone creates an absolutely amazing trailer that would be cool to include on the DVD — but can’t because of music licensing issues. Using Alex Wurman’s score — or your own original music — is a way around that, but is likely too limiting. ↩
- Thanks to everyone who started downloading these yesterday, and has kept seeding. ↩
Articles
September 19th, 2007 at 7:32 am
I’ve never tried anything like this before, what software is the best to use? Free if possible…I don’t think i have a chance of winning it I just wouldn’t mind having a go. Also can we find Alex Wurmans score anywhere?
September 19th, 2007 at 8:06 am
I knew I should have ordered Final Cut Studio. Let’s see what I can put together in iMovie then, hehe!
Shell - if you work on a Mac, you should have iMovie installed, and if you work in Windows XP you most likely have Windows Movie Maker on your machine. There are also a few online video editing services like http://jumpcut.com/ but I’ve never tried those personally. If you are serious about video editing, get Apple’s Final Cut on the Mac or Adobe Premiere on the PC.
September 19th, 2007 at 9:08 am
Great opportunity. Thanks. Is there a bribe feed I can subscribe to? Just kidding. It’ll be good practice.
September 19th, 2007 at 11:38 am
Is there a place where Alex Wurman’s score is available? It doesn’t appear to be included in the package.
September 19th, 2007 at 12:11 pm
I don’t think I’ll have the time to download this. Good ol’ 56k.
September 19th, 2007 at 1:32 pm
Short samples of Wurman’s work are here:
http://alexwurman.com/Music%20Clips/MusicClips.html
Just save them as Quicktime files on your hard disk and tah-dah! Only about 12 megs total for all 5 tracks.
Originally John said they would probably mirror the music somewhere else. I don’t know if that would include more than what you see here or not… but until we hear otherwise, it’s enough to get you started.
Unfortunately I’ve got deadlines this week. I’ll probably still work on it at a later date, but will miss out on all the fun for now. Enjoy! Looking forward to seeing the results.
September 19th, 2007 at 1:39 pm
ADDITIONAL CHALLENGE: The 24 HOUR version!
I know… I know… this is John’s blog, not mine… but I want to see what people can come up with by 7am (PST) on Thursday… exactly 24 hours after John’s post!
Have fun… 17.5 hours and counting…
September 19th, 2007 at 3:04 pm
I second the question about Alex Wurman’s score…
September 19th, 2007 at 6:49 pm
John,
Very excited about the competition even though I may not get to post an entry. I hope this hasn’t been asked anywhere else (or already supplied) but what are the chances of getting a copy of the official film logo in EPS format? can you post it on the site?
Avi
September 19th, 2007 at 7:36 pm
MPEG4 MIRROR HERE:
http://mattchapmanproductions.com/thenines/mpeg4/
September 19th, 2007 at 9:48 pm
Just wondering, is there a set length the trailer needs to be?
September 19th, 2007 at 10:56 pm
Alex Wurman has a nice chunk of the THE NINES SCORE available from his site.
http://alexwurman.com/Music%20Clips/MusicClips.html
September 20th, 2007 at 2:21 am
Ah, sweet editing. I’m looking forward to this. Thanks for being a good sport with your project.
September 20th, 2007 at 5:08 am
I tried using windows movie maker but it doesn’t accept .mov as a file format unfortunately!
September 20th, 2007 at 5:55 am
1 hour and counting…
September 20th, 2007 at 5:56 am
Even though I live in Australia and probably won’t see this film for another year, I’m definitely gonna try and give this a shot.
However I third the question of Alex Wurman’s complete score.
September 20th, 2007 at 8:00 am
A tip if you are using iMovie:
I had to remove the “/” from the file names (the ones starting with a 2) to get them to import into iMovie HD. Otherwise, iMovie gives an unkown error when importing these clips.
September 20th, 2007 at 11:27 am
Thanks a thousand times, DougJ - I had this very problem and didn´t know how to solve it.
September 23rd, 2007 at 6:29 pm
Haha, I couldn’t get some files to work in iMovie either so I had to manage without them. My trailer is finished and up on YouTube!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ej5cBydCnjA
I really really enjoyed working on this and I’m pretty happy with the result. Thanks for letting us play with your material John!
September 24th, 2007 at 7:34 pm
I’ve also managed to complete the trailer using Vegas 7 and the track He’s Not Coming Back by Alex Wurman.
My trailer is finished and uploaded to YouTube!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dgt7lmwUdTw
I too enjoyed working on this, would have liked to had my hands on Final Cut but I managed it with Vegas 7 none the less. Thanks for letting us experiment with your work John. Looks an interesting film..
Kevan R. Craft
September 24th, 2007 at 7:58 pm
Goddamn, I registered for the Sevens forum, received an email and went and promptly deleted the damn thing! So I don’t have a password to log in..
Is it possible you can resend me this, please?
Thanks in advance..
Kevan
October 23rd, 2007 at 2:20 pm
Now this is a mashup:
Here’s the link if that didn’t work: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92yHyxeju1U