Trailer competition FAQ
What should the tone of the trailer be?
Whatever you prefer. It can be funny, scary, dramatic or simply weird.
How long should the trailer be?
Most trailers are between one and three minutes, but if you feel like cutting a 30-second spot, or a half hour masterpiece, go for it. I reserve the right to stop watching after four minutes, however.
How can I get Alex Wurman’s score?
The entire score isn’t available, but Alex has ample samples up at his website: alexwurman.com.
What program should I use to cut my trailer?
Whichever one you prefer and understand. Final Cut Pro (or its little sibling, Final Cut Express) are great choices for the Mac, but there’s also Premiere, Vegas, and many flavors of Avid. The new iMovie would seem like an ideal choice, since it handles MPEG-4 footage natively, but it’s pretty limiting in practice. The older iMovie (iMovie HD) is actually more capable for this purpose.
Why are some clips silent?
In some cases, there was no useful production sound. An example is when Ryan is running. The ATV carrying the camera was incredibly loud. Only in one or two clips did we deliberately drop out sound in order to avoid spoiling a plot detail.
I’m intimidated. What if my trailer isn’t that good?
Allow me to set the bar very low by showing my sample entry, which I hacked together in about an hour. It’s no masterpiece. I wanted to try for a vastly different tone, and show off a variety of the shots available in the footage:
Can I Digg this?
While I’m leery of the server getting overwhelmed, it seems only fair to share. And the torrents should scale. So if you want to, go for it. Best to digg the original article.
How do I ___?
There are a lot of smart people reading this site, so if you have a specific question, don’t hesitate to ask in the comments section.
Can I enter more than one trailer? More than one category?
Absolutely. Knock yourself out.
Articles
September 20th, 2007 at 11:49 am
Your trailer kind of rocked. It kind of rocked so much that it rocked the pants off the official trailer…
September 20th, 2007 at 7:18 pm
Hi. First of all, thanks for this great idea. Now, could I participate with more than one trailer?, maybe one for categorie?
thanks.
Marcelo, Buenos Aires, Argentina.
September 20th, 2007 at 10:39 pm
I uploaded the DV package into Premiere. When I play each clip, it shows numbers on the top and bottom of the screen. How do I get rid of that?
September 20th, 2007 at 11:52 pm
Is it safe to assume that the commercial trailer is also acceptable as material for the “pure” category?
There are some shots such as the one where everyone appears to be inside ‘The Sims’ that aren’t in the pack. If we pull them straight from the trailer, it’s still counted as pure right?
Toby
September 21st, 2007 at 7:56 am
I uploaded the DV package into Premiere. When I play each clip, it shows numbers on the top and bottom of the screen. How do I get rid of that?
Scott, You’ll have to add a widescreen matte to the clips, then adjust to the correct ratio. I’m not 100% sure how to do this on Premiere, but it should be fairly easy. I think the clips are framed at 1.78:1, but 1.85 will work as well.
September 21st, 2007 at 8:05 am
**Toby (#4):**
I think you’re looking for VFX009.mov. It’s in there. We swapped the icons for numbers so people wouldn’t think it’s literally a game from the good people at EA.
Out of fairness, everyone needs to use the same bundle of shots for the “pure” trailer. But if you choose to create composite shots from stuff in the package with stuff you built yourself, excellent.
**Scott (#3):**
You need to apply a matte (1.78) to cover those numbers. You’ll essentially have an image of black bars on top of the footage, blocking out the numbers.
September 21st, 2007 at 8:25 am
Set the bar low? That last quote (”woman singing”) was perfect! I declare John the winner. Game over. Bow to the master.
September 21st, 2007 at 9:10 pm
Is there any way to save those files from Alex Wurman’s site?
September 22nd, 2007 at 12:40 am
Nick,
When listening to the music with quicktime in your browser there should be a little down arrow on the right-hand side of quicktime. Click that and select “Save As QuickTime Movie” and select the destination you want to save to.
Toby
September 22nd, 2007 at 9:46 am
I don’t have QuickTime Pro, and it costs roughly what I have in the bank at the moment. I guess I could go down to one of the editing labs and save the music there.
September 22nd, 2007 at 12:13 pm
ok i had a go, tihs is my first time attempting something like this (not a writer, director, editor or anything else!)
http://youtube.com/watch?v=Z_kdQioU56M
really enjoyed the chance to have a go :)
September 23rd, 2007 at 12:27 am
Here’s mine:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sirh2oUdR4M
September 23rd, 2007 at 8:53 am
A couple of days ago, when this competition was announced, I was a bit bored and tired and thought I’d give it a try. I don’t have much experience with video editing, but I imported the clips into a program called Kdenlive under Linux and started to play around with them. It was great fun. Terrific fun actually.
But then today I found that I should figure out how to render the video properly. That’s when I started using a lot of words that begin with F.
According to YouTube, the best format is 320×240. Okay, fine. Easy. Not so. Kdenlive gave me an output that was strechted in the vertical direction, and I don’t really think those elongated faces are that attractive. Appearantly you had to use some obscure hack to get a correct aspect ratio.
So I tried a trial version of Vegas Movie Studio for Windows. It required me to install Quicktime to import the clips, but then it went fine – not. Importing all the clips at once crashed the program. Impressive.
Over to a trial version of Adobe Premiere. This is the premiere video tool, right, this can’t go wrong? Haha. The output from this is not stretched, fine, but rather cropped. Cropped! That’s not what I asked for!
Could some kind Premiere user give me a hint of how I can produce a nice 320×240 resized original-aspect-ratio output? Thanks a lot!
September 23rd, 2007 at 9:32 am
Sorry for the rant, I seem to have figured it out. The solution was to set the resired output size in the Export settings and not in the Project settings. I think.
September 23rd, 2007 at 10:25 am
Nick,
The files are located at http://www.alexwurman.com/Music%20Clips/media/19thenines/
September 23rd, 2007 at 10:27 am
Ack. try this
try this
September 23rd, 2007 at 10:51 am
Here’s my first entry:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2a7JHVT3nGQ
September 23rd, 2007 at 7:12 pm
This is another entry for the competition:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QaB88JTJbgc
September 23rd, 2007 at 9:41 pm
I was just thinking, if you really wanted to put a trailer on the DVD but couldn’t because of the music, couldn’t you just provide links as a “web content” feature instead?
September 23rd, 2007 at 10:29 pm
Here ya go, John.
http://www.myspace.com/mikebellfilm1
It’s a little compressed due to myspace’s requirements, but I hope you like it.
Michael Bell
September 24th, 2007 at 8:23 am
It´s a bit sad that the deadline is so early. Would have loved to take part, but one week competition just doesn´t grant me the time to do so. I feel like we´ll miss many great contributions by making it one week instead of two or three – maybe you should think about extending the contest?
Greetings!