Comment needed on a Trailer

Love the editing and music. Thanks for sharing.

Right now the video is just a bunch of talking heads - to make it really interesting you'll need a lot of b-roll that you can cut-in during the monologues.

You could also use one individual whose personal story will tie everything else together and give the audience something to follow.

The trailer is done well as a teaser but I wouldn't rely on it for marketing because the issue isn't presented well enough for people who don't know what it is about. E.g., it starts with the first talking head spewing terminology that most non-brahmins wouldn't understand. Also, there is a big difference between brahmins from south India and north India - though I'm aware that you are only targeting groups in Singapore, which I believe is predominantly south Indian. What's missing, in my opinion, is a flow - a proper beginning, middle and end.

I propose you base the structure of your trailer around the AIDA principle.

And don't forget good sound recording mixing!

Hope this helps.

http://wolfcrow.com/blog/ - Workflow information and support for filmmakers, photographers, audiographers and videographers.

Trailers can serve various functions. They can be a straight overview of what a program contains, as if you just fast-skimmed a DVD. Or they can set up the genre of the film, it's emotional context. They often set out the outlines of a premise or plot, so you can judge if this is something you would care to follow to a conclusion or not.


I think your trailer as it is now, tries to be a micro-short version of the entire program, trying to teach what ostensibly the full program will teach, in 90 seconds. If you really COULD each all about this subject in 90 seconds, why make the longer film in the first place? So I think to be an effective teaser for the actual teaching film, to get people thinking about watching it, you instead should set up a sequence of leading questions, which the program will promise to answer. You seem to have two basic divergent lines of thought in this show, two schools of religious thought, and their implications in Indian society. Play up that issue, it makes for a simple, easy to grasp "plot".

I think you have too much footage in the trailer where I have to read tiny captions. Instead, for the trailer, dub an English translator, one that expresses the same emotional stresses as the native speakers.

I would like to see more variety in the framing, there are a lot of wide and medium shots and I would like to see more closeups interspersed. The face does 90 percent of the communicating in body language. Even if I don't know Hindi or Sanskrit, I can read a face and feel what they are feeling.