My Wonderful World of Trailers

I love watching trailers. I’m fortunate enough to land a job out of college that let me do something similar – writing promos for TV shows. A few years later, I got the chance to make actual trailers for local movies (two of which were scripted by my then yet-to-meet and yet-to-be life partner!) And after leaving that line of work to concentrate on program production for 6 years, I still opted to come back to head up the promo team at my current job.

You know my guilty pleasure in making promos and trailers? It’s making good ones out of bad shows and movies! Hah! I swear, the worst stuff on my show reel are for shows I do like. I think it’s the pressure of distilling a good show down to a 30 seconder - and the fact that with so many good scenes you get so lost in editing that whatever you wind up with is never good enough. And if it doesn’t rate or make money, then you will always get blamed. But bad titles? Hey, 1 or 2 good scenes is a blessing! And if people do watch the show and hate it, they say they were fooled by the trailer...which becomes a feather in your cap!

Why am I talking about all this? Because I saw this brilliant trailer on You Tube that really reminded me just why it is that I love what I do. You can make a good show look bad. You can make a bad show look good. And with a bit of patience and a lot of imagination, you can make a show that everybody has seen and loved into something they’d want to watch all over – or never ever – again.