Pre Production - TV Shows Teaser Research Part II (Low Budget Comparison)

One of the things I decided to look at was the difference between creating a low budget teaser and one with a good budget. Since teasers are not as common as trailers, specially for low budget, I decided to give a bit more of a in deep look to see if I could get a comparison between both and understand what are the kind of things that make them unique, whether it is the VFX, sound, dialogue, drama or what exactly. I found a great example that actually made taught me a lot and was great part of my research because it is a kind of comparison that is not made very often and can help to look at things that looking at individual teasers or trailer doesn't. This is a low budget trailer created by a group called Dumb Drum, who are just a group of 4 people that make funny videos. The following is an exact replica of one of the Star Wars The Force Awaken Trailer, but created fully in low budget. Although I am not filming a sci-fi, I am working on a low budget and I want to see and compare what really makes a teaser and I believe that having a look at this comparison and analyzing it based on my research, will give me a more clear idea of the kind of stuff I need to be having look at. Let's start with the low budget trailer:

                                        Low Budget

Big Budget

Watching at this trailer after having watched the original one dozens of times is very interesting because it allows me to see what kind of things are crucial in the making of a good teaser/trailer. As part of my research I found this statement from a reality TV Show editor that speaks about the purpose of a teaser, whether it is low budget or not. 

Your Teaser needs to be edited in such a way that it gives an Executive time to get settled AFTER they’ve pressed play.

When that viewing is done it needs to answer one question:

“What is your show about?”
http://iwanttomakeatvshow.com/teaser-tip/

Based on this statement, I have decided to breakdown the different elements of this trailer and compare it to the original one to see what are the key points about it and how will this affect the shooting and editing of our teaser.

Story

Story has always been a very important part of any show, because its the heart of it, it's where everything begins. In this case, the script and the story of the trailer remains the same, which still helps to give a sense of what this new film is going to be about and how it helps to put all the images together, making sense to what is coming. Although in a teaser there isn't that much of a story, it is still very important that the essence of the show is kept and the audience gets a glimpse on what it is about, which is once again based on the statement mentioned above. 

Visual Effects

This has become with time another very important factor, specially for Sci-Fi movies and actions ones, because a lot of people these days like to see a lot of "lights" and "shiny" things on the screen like lasers, fire, magic, spaceships, etc. Technology has made all this possible and that is why a lot of movies and TV Shows these days use a lot of special effects to make them more realistic. In this particular case, the effects are needed because it is a movie about lightsabers, spaceships and a lot on futuristic universe. Although the low budget trailer tries its best to replace those scenes, in my opinion it does quite well, because it still keeps the essence of the movie by keeping the rest of the elements intact. I believe this particular case helps in our teaser, because we are creating a show with not many visual effects, its all real and this allows to understand how without any big effects, you can still achieve something meaningful.

Music 

Like any production, sound and music play a very important role because its sets the tone of any scene. Although our show doesn't include a big amount of sound effects or music, it still needs to create a sound concept in which allows the viewers to identify the show with the music. Like in this case, although the music they have used has been all recorded with voice sounds, the melody is the same as the original star wars one, meaning that no matter how you listen to it, everyone that has seen Star Wars before will automatically associate it with the film. What I want to make sure as well in the edit of our teaser is that the main theme for our show is included, so that anyone that watches it starts already to get identified with it and associate it. We have picked a song that is not really well known and that suits perfectly with our show in my opinion and this will allows even more to achieve this, since people don't have it associated with anything so far. 

Camera Shots/Light

This is very likely one of the most important elements as well because poor light and wrong shots can ruin completely the type of message that you want to create. I will start comparing the low budget trailer first, implying that the camera shots are pretty much the same as the original one which still keeps that dramatic impact that is trying to make, but the light is very different than the original one due to not being very realistic, which makes the quality of it go down quite a bit. The fact that you are shooting in low budget doesn't meant that your light and everything else has to be bad, you can still create great visuals with proper use of light and color during the shoot and/or in post production. In our case we shot a teaser first that had very poor lighting and made the film look very flat and boring. We were trying to achieve a bit more of a mysterious look with some darkness in the room, but due to poor light this effects wasn't created properly which is what took us to re shoot our teaser. I am happy that that happened, because I learned a lot from it going back and doing more research about shooting and I learned from my mistake. 

Finally I will leave here a live comparison of both the trailers in case anyone is interested in watching them both at the same time and compare them themselves: