By now, you know that I love going to the movies. But going to the movies isn't the same as watching a film. I can do that at home. At the cinema I show up in time for the ads, and particularly the trailers (les bandes annonces). Sometimes, I enjoy the trailers far more than the movie. One of the greatest things about my Mac is the Front Row application, which lets me watch loads of new trailers.
Imagine my delight when a famous fashion brand – I can't reveal its name – asked me to write the script for a trailer that will launch a line of clothing based on superheroes. They even sent me the music, which put me straight in the mood. It also enabled me to decode the dynamics of a trailer. The music builds quickly, with a ticking clock beneath, accompanied by a humming sound that rises to a shattering whine at the end (Insert stunts! Explosions!) followed by a climactic boom! The key phrase («Your next scream may be your last») comes after the boom. The visuals work in the same way: the edits get shorter and shorter, with fairly long sequences at the beginning accelerating into a blur of back-to-back images (a car rolls, the hero hangs onto a moving train, falls out of a window, chops a villain's throat), like you're riffling through the pages of a comic book. I imagined all this while writing my own trailer. «And now, life will never be the same again.»
