Minimalism is an interesting artistic concept. Essentially, the idea of minimalism is to take the medium you're working in and strip it down to its most basic elements, removing an extraneous data to get to the core of what you're working with and what you're trying to say. Its principles stretch from painting to sculpture, from music to architecture and, lately, when I've been thinking of the term minimalism, I've been thinking about it in terms of movie previews.
Let me explain after the jump.
The very first movie preview that affected me in any significant way was something that I didn't, at the time, realize was a movie preview at all. It had no mark of being anything other than a thirty-second film infiltrating a late-night series of commercials to scare the shit out of me. It was comprised of grainy, black and white footage that grew increasingly more morbid and strange, spliced with repetitions of a single whispered phrase: "Before you die, you see the ring."
Given how much The Ring sucked, that seems funny now. At the time, though, I was genuinely spooked. I didn't know what to make of it, I was the only one of my friends to have seen it, and while it was postulated that it was probably an advertisement for something, nobody seemed to have any idea what it could have been for. Some of my friends were convinced I had hallucinated the entire thing.
While the thirty seconds of film weren't designed in a minimalist fashion (in fact, with how much they crammed in there, you could argue that, design wise, it was actually maximalist), how that clip tied into the movie was minimalism at its core. It set the entire mood for the movie without giving anything about the movie itself away. It was the complete opposite of the previews for Bedtime Stories.
The essential tenant of minimalism was the motto of architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, "Less is More". I don't know if there is a more apt motto for the creation of a movie preview. Some of the greatest movie previews of our generation have done a lot with very little. They captured the emotion and heart of the film they were advertising without giving away anything about the movie itself. One of the greatest examples of this minimalist approach include the first teaser trailer for The Dark Knight that debuted at 2007's San Diego Comic Con.
That sixty seconds told you everything you would feel in The Dark Knight without using a single frame of footage from the movie. It contains only four lines of dialogue and the core of its message is communicated in that final bone-chilling laugh of Heath Ledger's Joker.
Another terrific preview was the very first for this year's film Where the Wild Things Are. It spun together various footage from the film that told nothing of the film's plot (impressive, given that the entirety of the book could have been read in the duration of the preview), but it communicated its emotion primarily through the bittersweet joy of Arcade Fire's "Wake Up" and a few apt phrases.
You can do a lot with a little. Too often movie previews ruin some of the movies more interesting ideas by simply giving them up too early. Take the case of Premonition. They very first preview I saw of this movie was a two and a half minute trailer. The first minute of which was excellent, but ultimately ruined by the last minute and a half.
In that first minute we get everything we need to know. Ms. Congeniality and Dr. Doom are a happily married couple.
They have two kids. They are in love. One day Dr. Doom gets killed in a car crash (Can't he control metal? What the fuck.). Ms Congeniality is devastated. She falls asleep, only to wake up to the sound of the shower running and, just as the preview hits the sixty-second mark she opens it to reveal a completely unharmed Dr. Doom.
If you end the preview there, you have heightened interest in your movie. What happened? Was it a dream? Did he come back from the dead? I'm going to have to go see this movie to find out, you might say to yourself even though it stars a completely unlikable supervillain and the guy who played Dr. Doom. This first minute has given us just the right amount of setup and intrigue to catch a casual movie goer.
The next minute and a half of the preview, though, over explains the movie's one interesting plot twist, rendering the entire point of that twist moot. It doesn't even add any new emotions to the movie that weren't addressed in that first minute. By giving away that plot twist in the previews, you have ensured that the audience will learn nothing new about the characters until after this plot twists happens, effectively making the first forty-five minutes of your movie a waste. I can watch the entirety of Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog in that time.
The other day I saw a preview for The Wolfman, a movie starring Benecio Del Toro that is about werewolves. It looks like it could be the first werewolf movie worth watching for a reason other than this:
Mostly because of how the preview hints around the drama, the pain and the duality that seem to be the movie's central themes, without giving much of anything away. I'm not saying that The Wolfman is absolutely going to be a good movie based on its preview (as I first mentioned, I really liked that preview for The Ring), but it has at least captured the ideas of minimalism when it made its preview. Don't give away too much.
Minimalism is an interesting artistic concept. When applied to visual art, it can often come off as pretentious, like this dude with his giant Lite-Brite:
But when you take the principles of it and apply it to movie previews, it becomes an effective tool for showing us how a movie is going to make us feel without telling us so much that we won't spend our fifteen dollars.
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