Deadline - Movie Trailer - MMEA Submission 2019 - ID# 263

South Elgin
Movie Trailer
Entry Description

Teaser trailer for the forthcoming feature film "Deadline". Directed by: Gunil Ko. Music credit: Icon Trailer Music "Out of Time"

Recent Teacher Comments

  • 4/11 3:34 pm - The cinematography and pacing of the trailer was excellent. Great job building rising action through visuals and music. The smoke machine and other shots were well composed and focused. The trailer needs improvement in two levels. The most important area for improvement is story. I don't know anything about your protagonist or what the conflict for the trailer is. As an audience member, if I can't connect with characters or have a specific sense of the primary conflict in the movie, I'm not going to watch. Make sure you put these elements into your trailer. It's not that hard to do if you know your characters and your story. Often times, it's 1-2 lines of dialogue or voice over that can make all of the confusion become crystal clear. The second area of improvement is audio. Make sure your levels are properly mixed. Dialogue was too soft and music was too loud. Overall, good elements are here. Keep studying narrative structure and how trailers are constructed from a story perspective. Apply that to your emerging talents as a cinematographer and you'll do very well.
  • 3/27 4:50 pm - Great scream at the end! Trailer had some good elements to it, including dramatic music and the constant tick of the clock to add that mood of suspense. Audio quality dropped when the characters spoke- the audio was very echoey and distant, as if no mic was used. The biggest problem was the title told us there was a deadline that needed met, but we never really got the sense of what the deadline was or what was happening in the movie. There needs to be a hook, and letting us know what the storyline is needs to be part of that hook.
  • 3/4 10:02 am - Good pacing and use of sound (clicks) to drive the trailer. Quality camerawork and use of different angles, wide and close up shots. Not sure I understand what is going on in the story between the characters.
  • 2/26 12:40 pm - So much promise - very compelling camera work and nice variety of shots, crisp editing, and compelling choices of sound effects and music. HOWEVER...and this is a BIIIIIG HOWEVER. Your grasp of audio mixing is terrible. Make sure you're watching the VU meter when you're recording AND editing. Dialogue levels should be between -6 and -12 db, sound effects between -12 and -18 db, and music beds should be around -24 db. All of your audio was hot, but most clearly your dialogue scene from 30-33 seconds was drowned out by the extremely loud music. The overpowering audio levels completely destroyed your trailer. Story wasn't strong enough to hook audience. What is going on? What is the deadline all about? Why does it matter to the audience? What is the relationship between the 2 guys in the trailer? Most importantly - WHY should your audience care about any of this? You can't rely on title sequences and epic music to draw interest if there's no story there.
Judge 1

Positives:

Improvements:

Judge 2

Positives: Very nice editing work – sticking to the 'time' motif with the 'tick tock' cuts.

Improvements: Sound recording can be improved to clean up dialogue – and a little additional color correction work would go a long way.

Judge 3

Positives: The first three shots of your trailer are very effective. The closeup shots grabbed my attention and made me want to see the rest of your piece. The ticking clock SFX worked well. It was subtle and helped to build the mood you were creating. The editing was interesting. You very carefully cut on the beat of the music or the click of the clock and in some cases the back beat. Regardless, you took advantage of the rhythm of the music to help make your work much more effective.

Improvements: Here are some suggestions to help make this even better. Try doing a time stretch with the smoke and slow it down to half or a quarter of the speed. Make sure you do a frame blend. That will smooth out the time stretch. Make text animations more powerful. Keep them on screen as long as they are now, but move them much more. The start position your are using is fine. They should scale up to about three times of their current end position. You will have to experiment for the exact size. That will make them move faster, cause them to be hard hitting and compliment the audio. Try adding some color correction to either make the colors more rich or add some contrast to you shots.

Judge 4

Positives:

Improvements: