Hollywood's art of the tease

Inside the Golden Trailer Awards, where the creators of cinema's most unforgettable previews finally take centre stag

LOS ANGELES:

When Monica Brady and Evelyn Watters were looking for a team to produce a trailer, they were shocked to find that creatives working in the field were practically anonymous.

The experience prompted the pair to create the Golden Trailer Awards, which kicked off in 1999 to recognise the people behind Hollywood's best-made movie previews.

"Trailer editors, the people creating some of the most memorable moments of the moviegoing experience, were completely unrecognised," Brady told AFP ahead of the gala's 26th edition last week. "They weren't credited on trailers, they weren't credited in films, and there wasn't even a directory to find them."

The pair, who remain as executive producers on the award show, oversaw 19 prizes given out during the inaugural ceremony in New York. This year's ceremony was held in Los Angeles and recognised achievements in more than 100 categories.

The night's most coveted statuette for Best of Show went to the trailer for sci-fi movie 'Project Hail Mary', starring Ryan Gosling, which was created by Wild Card Creative Group. But what makes one movie trailer stand out from the rest "is a great hook," Watters said.

Taylor Engel, a creative director at Create Advertising Group—which received 16 nominations this year for the company's work on trailers for 'Sinners', 'Tron: Ares' and 'Only Murders in the Building' - said editing a trailer is like putting together pieces of a puzzle.

"We get materials at the beginning of the project, and it could be anything. Sometimes you get the movie, sometimes you get just dailies, you know, just the scenes that they shot," Engel said. The challenge lies in combining the audio and video to "tell maybe a different story or showcase the movie in some way."

Like film editing, movie trailers have evolved over the decades in Hollywood, and the crowded marketplace for attention has led to fierce competition. Sometimes, the trailer ends up being better than the movie itself - something that has become its own category in the Golden Trailer Awards.

Despite the intense competition and demand, Engel said that the work in making movie trailers is not under the same pressure to utilise artificial intelligence as other sectors of Hollywood. "Every cut is very specific in why you pair a shot with a certain piece of music," Engel said.

AI tools "may get better at recreating what's been done in the past, but what's exciting about trailers is when you see something that you've never seen before, you see it done in a different way," the creative director said. AFP