Making trailers, teasers and all of the small bumpers, GIFs and short clips requires a lot of time and effort.
Those are the most important assets for every film marketing campaign. The best way to do it doesn't exist. However, I read and watched lots of materials about film trailers and teasers, the best length, style, structure etc. What I found is that every film, every story is unique and different, even despite being in a conventional genre or franchise it still has its uniqueness.
In our case I made three trailers. One unofficial which was made in 2014 few months after the end of the production and two more, two months before the official theatrical release.
Trailer can't be completely different from the movie itself, but it has to have one very important quality in it. It has to be eye catching, even better if it provokes interest, provoking immediate desire in the audience to want to see the film right now, at this moment.
The difference between teaser and trailer is very simple. The length and their structure. Teasers are used because of their short format, usually less than 1 minutes, mostly around 30 sec or 45 sec. Teasers are representing the mood and the style of the film. They are used as a sample to which the audiences quickly feel whether this film could be for them or not. The watching rate is almost always 100% throughout all of the clip. So basically everyone watches the entire teaser from beginning to its end.
Trailers are different, most of them give an idea who is the main hero of the story, and what's the story about, the main conflicts and resolutions also very often appear in the trailer. The norm for its length is 90 seconds. For longer films with complex plots and narration sometimes the trailer is over 120 sec. However, this is a very risky length on the internet.
For example NoOne's trailer which has till this moment 6 000 000 views, has watched rate 75% until 1 minute, after that for the rest 30 sec the rate drops to around 50%. That's why it is risky to make longer trailers especially for micro budget films. I feel that for this type of indy films the sayings less is more and shorter is better couldn't be more appropriate in everything regarding one micro budget film.
For this trailer we used a song from KINK which is one of the best dj in the world at the moment. He was very kind to give it for free, then we tried to get for the last 30 sec of the trailer a song from Nils Frahm but unfortunately we couldn't pay for it. Here comes the luck for which sometimes I am talking about. After the rejection from Nils Frahm agency, I had to find a way to get a similar music for the trailer, because I used the Frahm's track as a TEMP music and I cut the entire 30 sec segment on the track rhythm. Pavel Stoychev came at hand here, he was able make by himself the piano and I was astounded how much better the music sounded and the entire trailer looked with his composition.
Trailers might be very tricky and very often filmmakers suggest that the best approach to them is somebody out of the project to cut them. Somebody with fresh eyes and not attached mind towards the story and its characters and meaning.
Last but not least, is that I found that because I edited every piece of material, all of the teasers, trailers etc, my vision and perception were dusted about how they could look the best. Here came in help from Christo from A+Films, who is a master of making trailers. He basically taught me very quickly how a trailer has to be edited. Few tricks, here and there over sudden made the entire trailer to look and feel much more powerful, more interesting. He showed me how from cutting different random dialogues you can make a narration and a completely different story and plot. Which eventually will be able to drag people to the cinemas.
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For Yatagan the teasers and trailers were entirely done by Christo Dermendzhiev the producer of the film. We had a very difficult time doing them, because Yatagan is a situational comedy, so the plot twists and subplot connections were very important to be kept hidden and not revealed through the film's trailers and teasers.
Additionally to that, the movie is a very small despite looking big, so we didn't have big action scenes, in reverse, the movie is 90% dialogues and talking, so to cut a trailer which to protect the story and at the same time to hook the viewer was a great challenge.
Christo found a solution for this problem by creating not existing story lines and conflicts in the trailer which were still ringing true to the film context, theme and genre.
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