Fake Movie Trailer

Curatorial Statement

This project works to recontextualize the scenes and characters of a popular TV show in the environment of an action movie trailer. This edited video combines Captain America: The Winter Soldier with the popular television series The Office. The basis of the trailer remains the same as before, but all of the video has been replaced by scenes taken from the TV show. While the subject fields are extremely different and seeming unrelated, this video works to blend The Office’s comedy and lightheartedness with the action movie’s serious and intense plot.

Another component of this media project is its online presence, and the video has been shared on several different platforms in order to reach as many viewers as possible.

Product

The video above is my final product.

My final video was based off of the official Marvel trailer on YouTube. For my project, I used the audio directly from the official trailer, and I found scenes from The Office that matched those in the original trailer (for example, similar conversations/locations/setup). I used screen-recordings from Netflix to get the scenes, and I used Adobe Premiere to edit the video. For the presentation, I used a monitor to show a combined version of the two trailers, with the original video on top and my edited version below, so that viewers were able to see the direct similarities/differences between the two.

I also uploaded the edited video to YouTube to continue with the “spreadable media” theme from Module 2. I shared the video with some communities online, primarily using Reddit to target specific audiences (such as other fans of the show), and it received mild success. My Reddit post didn’t get super popular, but it got about 30 upvotes and some positive comments from other users. 

Intention

While going over my previous projects this semester, I realized that my Module 2 video was the one I really enjoyed and wanted to extend and refine. For that project, I did a mash-up between two TV shows, The Office and Community, and it parodied the standard romance tropes in many shows/movies (“long looks, stolen glances…”). I wanted to continue the idea of recontextualizing existing characters and scenes, and I decided that an edited movie trailer would give me a storyline to follow. I chose an action movie since I wanted to try out something new. My main goals were to create an accurate imitation of the original trailer and to create an enjoyable mash-up video that I could share online. My Module 2 project didn’t “go viral” as I was hoping it would, so I was hoping to create a more focused video that would make sense to both targeted fan groups and random viewers browsing the web. 

Context

This is an example of what I want my final video to look like. This uses a different TV show for scenes, as well as a different movie trailer, but it is an example of using comedic scenes in a serious, action movie setting. One thing I noted was the build-up of sound throughout this video. Even though it incorporated some of the sound clips from the TV show, you could also hear the building intensity of the music behind the original trailer, which adds a lot of entertainment for the viewers. Some of these factors might be changed when I turn this into an installation, since sound is much more clear when focusing on a video online than seeing it in person on a monitor or projection, but it was nice to have an example of a humorous and engaging video of the same style.

This is another example of a re-cut trailer. This one is more humorous than the previous one, but uses many of the same techniques. Both examples use a clever mix of dialog from the scenes and an overall “trailer” narrator to tell the story. 

This “Trailer for Every Oscar-Winning Movie Ever” video is a parody of standard tropes used in movies and movie trailers. It imitates the storyline set-up of the plot, as well as the rapid exposition presented throughout a standard trailer. While this is much more of a parody than my project, I found it really representative of standard movie trailers and what to expect from them. 

This is a piece done by Harun Farocki called “Workers Leaving the Factory in 11 Decades”. The video installation consists of a row of 12 monitors, each showing different scenes of factory workers outside of the factories themselves. While the theme of the piece is very different from my project, this was a good example of the use of multiple monitors in a video installation. In Farocki’s installation, half of the films are silent, but the other half can be listened to through headphones. I also enjoyed how the scenes differed in length and ran out of sync with each other, but still created a powerful effect overall. Even though my installation will likely be just 2 monitors side by side, I hope to extend many similar ideas from the installation of 12 monitors.

Molly Davies’ video installation, “Traditions, Inventions, Exchange”, was focused on presenting the process of creative give and take. It is a three-part video and sound installation, shown on a continuous loop, with each screen showing three moving images. The work brings together artists from Indonesia, Japan, and the United States, and it highlights the cultural differences between the different artists, showing how they played into the final work. This project gave me some more ideas about presenting my video installation during class, as well as how to use my final product to present many of the creative decisions made in the process of putting together the video. 

Process

I started by analyzing the original trailer, watching it over and over again to get a sense of what scenes I needed. I then went to Netflix to find these scenes. I remembered some episodes that had more applicable scenes (such as Michael hitting Meredith with his car, Dwight firing the bazooka, etc.), so some material was really easy to find. The hardest problem was finding enough scenes to match the many intense fighting scenes in the original trailer, since there aren’t that many plane crashes or gunfire in The Office. I ended up replacing many large-scale violence with smaller scenes of general chaos from The Office.

I also needed to most effectively present the video during class. I wanted to highlight the many similarities between my trailer and the original, since I kept my project relatively authentic to the official video. I originally was thinking about showing the video on two different computer monitors, one showing the original and one showing the edited version. However, since both versions already had a cinematic widescreen ratio, I decided to put the two videos in one, the original on top and my edited one below, and they would play together at once. 

Collaboration

This was an individual project.

Reflection

I was overall proud of the final project. With the rest of finals week, I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to spend enough time on it to refine and make it as good as possible. However, all of the practice we did with Premiere during visual labs this semester really paid off, and I was able to edit much faster than I expected. There are still improvements to be made on the video, such as better syncing voices to lips, but it still came out pretty well.

My biggest challenge throughout the entire process was still finding the right scenes to match the original trailer, especially during the huge action scenes. If I had infinite time to continue working on this, I would probably run through the entire series and look for good scenes to put together.

While this video was more successful in “going viral” than my Module 2 project, it still didn’t gain as much popularity as I was hoping. One Redditor who watched the video wrote “At first I had no clue how that would work from the title, but the video ended up being beautiful”, so that might have been one reason it didn’t get as many views as I’d intended.

Attribution

I took the original trailer (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SlILk2WMTI) off of YouTube and relied on its audio for my project.

I used QuickTime screen recordings of Netflix in order to get the scenes from the TV show.