trailers, raves and you
When it comes to music, I think dj's and I when I think dj's I think vj's. If anything I was a VJ before a DJ. I used to create videos for nightclubs and raves. I took great pride in it. Armed with my amgia in hand I ventured forth to create wildly unique video reels. I sampled clips from movies, and shot my own stuff and incorportated toaster magic and lightwave 3d, I really got into it. Course just anything seems to sync up nicely to a beat. Thats an old joke Andy and I had at ADV FILMS. Take any techno beat and match it up with a few cuts of anime and its like presto perfect sync. We'd always laugh when some visual seemily unplanned seemed to sync up just perfectly with some audio in the background.
So in the past I never liked automated VJ's. I didn't like the 3d animation reels either, they lacked real substance and I think as would be club goer myself I wanted to see stuff that lept off the screen, targeted me and where I was right now. Even back then they had basic switchers and cut effects the typical cheesy wipe hardware device.
Bah I say. Yesterday after a killer game of ping-pong, the old man whipped me again. I went thru a box of old video tapes. Videos I did for raves, 10speed, even my own precious pre-tapes were still entact. I loved making pre-tapes. Which to me were tapes of various visuals fused together ready to be fused once again in something new. I made pre-tapes at ADV as well. I used them extensively on shows like Neon Genesis Evangelion. It was always a pain to go thru each epsiode to find good clips for every time i had to make a trailer. What's that? Why did ya go thru each episode to find clips, why not just take from the first episode? Look pal I didn't get the name trailer dan cause I sucked at it. I made damn good trailers. And the key to trailer making, least in my opinon is a few core factors- footage, presence, beat, no lips without a voice and fame and fortune.
Footage is all about what ya got. For Spriggan I had 20mins of footage and a cd soundtrack, which I stole from 3 tracks and made my trailer background piece along with effects. For Evangelion I had 23 epsiodes to pull from, typically I only had say the first 6 or so cause they trickled in the door and we had to go baby go. So good footage works. If its action, great, if its not action and they want an actionable like trailer, bad, you cant make up animation right, so ya gotta figure out how to build the action with dramatric presence.
Presence is really the pace of trailer, is it fast, is it slow, is it verbal. Typically we never had a vocal track so in that regards your presence or pace follows the beat and the visual footage ya got. So its presence thru footage, edit style and music. Gotta have good music. Sometimes I didn't get music and had to fake it like that was on purpose. For Parasite Eve I didn't have any real music. If fact I didn't have much of anything. It was a hard production to do. And remember I typically had to crank out at trailer in 2 weeks. Speaking of Parasite Eve, it was one of ADV's first live-action flicks that departed from the giant monster world of Gamera etc. It also wasn't very good. But it did have playstation tie-in ability which is why the master called for its aquistion no doubt. Heh, I was looking for the trailer online just now.. hoping I could show it off.. instead i found this little tidbit regarding the DVD of the film and how one reviewer was disappointed seeing the trailer as a value added extra. LOL
"The final insult was the joke of a 'trailer', which I assumed would be a Japanese promotion or something, but instead, it's a promotional trailer for the U.S. release that, quite literally, features voice-over by someone apparently cupping their hands over their mouth to sound 'evil.' The trailer also claims Parasite Eve is from "the masters of Japanese horror", which is an odd comment since the majority of the crew were first-time filmmakers, part of a newly formed television drama department at Fuji TV Network."
Those are all vaild points. Like I said I didn't have any music and you can't really dub in the japanese in there saying fear cause no one would understand it right? unless ya had a subtitle. And we didn't dub the picture so no english to go with. I had to use David Del Rio orginally from the shipping department ( now I think hes doing marketing ), to give me some errie voice. The trailer came together pretty well I thought. Still funny looking back on that.
Ok back to the factors and the point of this entry today. Next up we have beat. I liked editing on a beat, it just works. Most of my work focused on the beat. And typically fans liked my edit style. I recall much of those early days of ADV as innovation times. We were the underdog and the stakes seemed more flexibile in terms of what we could do and dish out to the masses. We made our market the way we wanted to make it. Now perhaps its still the same though parts me think ADV has grown up. And did it recall any of the youth along the way? Who knows.
Next up we got no lips without a voice. I'm a eye person. I do alot of looks, stares, whimscal gestures, sighs, but never a lip. No one is talking in my trailers unless theres a voice to give the viewer that connection. This is probably the reason why trailer dan ended his career doing japanese animation with ADV. The boss always wanted more trailers like "them.. those other folks.." he wanted to hear his characters speak. Typically though I did trailers long before we started actual production on the title. I easily beat out the dubbing studio crew by five to six weeks. And time was everything, six weeks of extra play time promotion time is huge. Anyways the boss always gave me the evil eye of sorts. He wanted dubbed trailers before we ever did the dub. Which is difficult and I dont think he ever really got it. Cause they still have the problem today heh. Still I was open to doing trailer dubs seperate from the film. Its a trailer its a promo, thats all run with it ya know. That was frowned on due to consistancy, you cant have the green robo guy have this voice only to have that voice later, thats bad bad bad. But I say what the hell man, you want dubbed trailers we gotta do it. Or you opt for the 3rd party narrator guy that talks over the trailer, now you introduce a non existant character voice into a film that dint have a narrator. It helps the trailer out but then again the consistancy police show up and complain that the guy doesnt exist so no. In end, no lips no talkin unless you got vocal element there.
Lastly fame and fortune. Make the trailer, make the edit, larger than life. This is really just sheer editing here. Make it look good.
I just looked at the ADV site, ok sure its been about 4 years since I've been there and ya not much of my old skool video trailers are still there. Expect I did notice the new "directors cut" edition trailer of Neon Genesis Evangelion uses my original edit as the base of it. Thats flattering. Goood to know they respect the trailer dan ya know. HA! Hehe.. still good stuff. I like some of their new trailers, but I'm pretty critical on ones that don't grab me and take me for a ride. Heck I'll have to do a piece on the do it now, next time around.
And the point of this whole ramble is that while in the past i've always opted to go into excessive detail when it comes to visual editing magic.. i've always been interested in the tech side of cheating it so to speak to get the same effect.
And heres a cool site with some tools that cheat in my opinion but are very clever and slick tools to boot. Motordrive.