Scrubbing UpTrailers: Part 1 — High Noon
NOTE: This series maybe delayed, as I’m moving back to the UK with a laptop highly unadapted to Davinci Resolve. Hopefully I’ll be able to complete the series sooner rather than later.
Editing has always been a part-time hobby of mine. Tucked away in a securely forgotten place are stop-motion mash-ups, mini-docs pulled from clips on the internet, and perhaps some images of me syncing up songs to my miming. Let those skeletons be forever hidden.
But, ever since I started looking in bargain bins for old films, yes I was that kind of kid, there was a part of the extras section I loved: the trailers.
I think nowadays we’d see them a quite hokey: a lot more “In a world…” and tons more text on the screen. But, they were artfully done, in my opinion, and spared a lot more of the story than some trailers we see today.
For your consideration: High Noon
So what’s all this about?
I’ve decided to take old films and re-vamp their trailers to try and present them in a more naturalistic, contemporary way. I have to admit up front, I’m no trailer expert, and my editing is so-so. This is partly for my own entertainment, while providing some needed editing practice, but mainly it’s a crash course in working with narrative structure.
Trailers are brutal, you need to sell a story in 2 mins max (in my opinion at least). As an aspiring screenwriter, one of the many legion, I thought this’d be good spare time practice in forming a clear narrative. Separating the wheat from the chaff. Etc.
What am I using and what’s my process?
This is a part by part series, so far I’m gathering the building blocks for my trailer together in DaVinci Resolve. It’s free and versatile, and that suits me fine.
I sketched out the main goals for the trailer: Frank Miller’s coming to town, Will Kane feels responsible for stopping him, but the town won’t help.
Those are the three points I want to get across, so I set about chopping up the film into my useful scenes, doing compound renders so I can move them around like scene cards on a table.
The spine of my trailer concept is Marshall Kane walking to meet the gang, battered, with each glance bringing a flash that reveals more of the story.
What does that look like? Have a peek:
I’m sorry, that was cheap. The rest is coming, this is a series after all.
The process of editing this trailer has been…iterative. I’m discovering as I work along. For example, one idea for a scene I couldn’t let go of for ages had the trailer start, more or less, with Kane’s wedding vows. The idea was to juxtapose them with flashes from later in the film when “till death do you part” becomes a real prospect.
That’s only badly rendered snippet, but as I cut and spliced my way through, it was eating into the narrative I needed to get across in the best way possible. That there’s a guy called Frank, his buddies are coming to kill Kane, and nobody wants to help.
Tune in again later this week where I show off my process of selecting and stacking the sounds and music, bringing us closer to the final product.
That’s today from The Culture Den. Remember to find that song you love, the film to revel in, or some TV show you adore, and lose yourself in them, if but for a moment!
