A Crash Course in Making a Toon Trailer
Before thinking feature, many animators first test the waters with a trailer.
Also, with animated features costing lots and lots of moolah, investors often need to be brought onboard, which makes having a great trailer in your pocket that much more valuable. A good trailer can serve as the flagship for all your funding, marketing and promotional efforts.
In addition to being a valuable marketing and promotional tool, a trailer can help set up production pipelines and get you well down the path of producing the full-length feature, as many assets that will be used will have already been created for the trailer.
The Nuts and Bolts
A trailer should be a short video (ideally 45-60 seconds long) that reveals the most interesting and captivating aspects of your soon-to-be-produced feature film, with the intention of grabbing as many viewers as possible.
A trailer is no time to be cavalier (save mystery, vagueness and subtlety for a teaser). Make the trailer strike hard, strike fast, and with no mercy. Showcase snippets of the best action sequences, the biggest explosions, the most famous celebrity tal-
ent, the funniest scenes and the most interesting — if not irresistible — aspects of your feature film.
For example, if you are making an action-based feature, taking a crescendo approach for the trailer is a great way to leave viewers awestruck. That is, start at a steady pace but keep building and increasing intensity in volume, visuals and pacing until it reaches a fever pitch, ending with an explosion of sight and sound, then quickly and quietly dissipating to perfect calm, allowing the viewer to finally catch their breath.
For a comedy, the most critical goal is to make people laugh. If no one laughs along with your trailer, no one will want to see the movie. Sight gags and slapstick, done well, can be invaluable for comedy trailers because they are quick and to the point. Also, try to present characters that are quirky and memorable. Sometimes, showcasing a charming, appealing character that somehow just seems funny, moreover a character that viewers can project humor onto, can generate even more interest than clever jokes.
And if you can do this all while revealing enough key story elements of your film to hook the audience, you’ve done your job.
You don’t want to tell too much, however, as this can take away some of the intrigue. How many times have you watched an over-long trailer that made you feel that you no longer needed to see the actual movie because you know more than enough about it from the trailer?
Keep your trailers informative and captivating but not over-long, as this can spoil interest in your project.
Small Package, Big Workload
Even though it may be short in running time, creating a trailer is no small task. What you are doing is essentially making a mini-movie. In fact, trailers are so heavily front-loaded from a production standpoint that the work you put in will be disproportionate to the finished product you make.
For example, designing, creating and rigging a character for a trailer can be exactly the same process and workload that you would need to endure for the feature, yet you will only end up with about 60 seconds of screen time.
Typically speaking, a trailer is often made by cutting as many corners as possible so you may not need to build in all the bells and whistles of each character that you may need to for the feature, but a bulk of the work will still need to be done.
Put on Your Editor Hat
A trailer is an exercise in editing. No matter how carefully you plan your storyboards, a trailer will stand or fall on its editing. Think of compressing the grandiosity of editing an entire feature film into 60 seconds. In a feature film, if a shot lingers for a few seconds too long, you can get away with it. In a trailer, even a split-second of awkwardness can feel like an eternity and instantly lose your audience.
A great trailer has the power to thrill audiences, gain interest and
build momentum for its respective feature. Treat your trailer with the utmost care and it may very well help you get to the next level of producing and distributing your very own animated feature film.
‘In a trailer, even a split-second of awkwardness can feel like an eternity and instantly lose your audience.’