Research and Planning: Good Trailers vs. Bad Trailers - Bad Examples

The first trailer we see here is for film Valentine's Day, in which if the title isn't cheesy enough, the film itself is just as bad. The trailer is very erratic with no real storyline, playing off that the only thing that will make you want to go and see it is the cast (and there's a lot of them) the trailer gives away nothing of what the film is going to be or what its about, instead giving you quick jumpcuts showing random actors and people from the film, with a strange song playing over the top and no dialogue from the characters. At the beginning the music starts and they have used a very upbeat song, which sounds more like a rave song, and gives nothing away of the genre of the film, but instead we already guessed by the awful title of the film. However that song dies out in about five seconds and instead we get a strange beat over the top of the dialogue, which makes it difficult to even hear what they are saying, as well as using a pointless 6 seconds of music. Considering that the budget of the film was $52 million, you'd think that they would take more time in carefully creating a good trailer, instead of just throwing a load of actor's names around like a self obsessed name dropper. 



The next trailer we see here is for film 'Fool's Gold' which sounds like an awful pirate spin off movie, in which it starts out with conventional music, check, but with confusing dialogue which makes no sense to the audience as to what is going on other than the woman and man in the film are getting a divorce. The trailer itself is messy, and the audience does not know whats going on, and then the trailer goes on to show the audience too much of the film and basically tells the audience what the film is about and whats going to happen. Very cliche, and obvious, that the two couple should get back together, in which the trailer shows us this as it shows us a scene of them kissing. I think that a trailer should hint at ideas of whats going to happen without giving too much away or really what is the point of going to see a film anyway? But then the trailer moves on to actually become a strange pirate spoof, in which the audience finds out that there is buried treasure somewhere, leaving the audience feeling dizzy with the amount of stuff going on in the trailer and how stupid it is becoming, also leaving it very difficult to sit through the whole trailer without wanting to turn it off.