Movie and TV trailer production is a game of chess. Except in this game, millions of dollars are at stake with every move.
Movie trailers are a game of chess. Except in this game, millions of dollars are at stake with every move.
Dallas Taylor, owner of Defacto Sound and host of Twenty Thousand Hertz, gives us a peek behind the curtains where creativity and business live in a pressure cooker.
A few curiosities you’ll uncover in this episode:
A Quick Request
If you enjoy Curious State, would you mind sharing your favorite episode with a friend? It’s a great way to help the show grow and start fun conversations along the way.
There are so many incredible podcasts out there, and you’ve chosen to be here. That means the world to me. Thank you.
Credits
Curious State is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast hosted and produced by Doug Fraser.
Find Curious State on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, or subscribe to our newsletter for the latest updates.
Podcast Manager - Adam Cecil
Podcast and Advertising Operations Specialist - Morgan Christianson
Digital Operations Specialist - Holly Hutchings
Marketing and Publicity Assistant - Davina Tomlin
Intern - Kamryn Lacy
The Quick and Dirty Tips network is a division of Macmillan Publishers in partnership with Mignon Fogarty, Inc.
Have a question? Or a topic you’d like covered on the show? Maybe you just love sending emails? Whichever shoe fits, tie it on and send me a message at curious@quickanddirtytips.com.
Cinematic Quote
“Same thing is coming for all of us. And it is here.”
Doug
Have you ever watched a movie or TV trailer on mute? You're getting the visual information, but it's only part of the story that the trailer is telling. Without sound, the immersion of the trailer ceases. Suspension of disbelief fades away, and it feels weird.
Dallas
I am Dallas Taylor, and I own a sound design studio called Defacto Sound, which specializes in trailers, advertising, and network promos. So most of what we do are very short form, 60 seconds or less, high impact type of sound design. As of last year, we mixed 800 Netflix trailers and about 150 HBO trailers.
Doug
When you're working on these trailers, do you consider it more of an art or a science?
Dallas
There's a third category. I think it's art, science and business.
Doug
Those three elements combined in the game of three dimensional chess, except in this game, millions of dollars are at stake with every move. I'm Doug Fraser, and this is Curious State. Hey, it's Doug, I have a quick request. If you enjoy Curious State, would you mind sharing your favorite episode with a friend? It's a great way to help the show grow. And it might start a fun conversation as well. And while I have you, I just want to say thank you. There are so many incredible podcasts out there and right now you've chosen to be here with me. And that means everything. Thank you.
Doug
Besides making you want to watch the movie, what is the purpose of a trailer?
Dallas
To make as much money as possible. Every split second is designed for short attention spans. Commercials and advertising in general seems to be getting kind of shorter and shorter and shorter. The advertising side is it was kind of like the OG of short form content. I would say the length is very much a business decision. It's a lot of stress to try to tell this in 30 seconds or a minute or 90 seconds to say you need to watch the show, especially when brilliant shows take a long time to get somewhere. Thinking of like Breaking Bad or Ozark or these tension type of shows. The art of making that trailer is so much about just creating enough curiosity to get someone to actually just press play.
Cinematic Quote
“At some point you make a choice about who you are and what you want.”
Doug
Things have changed since the first trailer debuted in American theaters in 1913. By the way, that first trailer wasn't even for a movie. It was for a Broadway play called “The Pleasure Seekers”. And it was revolutionary. The trailer was described as an entirely new and unique stunt. It was the brainchild of Nils Granlund, who definitely has a 1930 name, who was an advertising manager for his local theater chain. Now the following year, the first trailer for a movie arrived promoting a Charlie Chaplin film. And guess what? Our buddy Mills was also behind that. The format of the movie trailer changed through the decades. They used to be less like this...And more like this... And sometimes the trailer itself was its own separate story, like the 1941 trailer for Citizen Kane.
Orson Welles
“How do you do ladies and gentlemen? This is Orson Welles. I'm speaking for the Mercury Theatre. And what follows is supposed to advertise our first motion picture. Citizen Kane has the title. And we hope it can correctly be called a coming attraction. It certainly coming, coming to this theater, and I think our Mercury actors make it an attraction. I'd like you to meet them. Speaking of attraction, while the chorus girls are certainly an attraction, but frankly, ladies and gentlemen, we're just showing you the chorus girls for purposes of ballet. It's pretty nice.”
Doug
And let's not forget the trailer for Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho which took viewers on a tour of the film set.
Alfred Hitchcock
“Good afternoon. Here we have a quiet little motel tucked away off the main highway. And as you see perfectly harmless looking when you In fact, it has now become known as the scene of a crime.”
Doug
This style of trailer wasn't just selling the film, it was selling the creators, the directors, and the players the glitz and glamor of Hollywood culture. But soon enough things changed again.
Cinematic Quote
“There is a creature alive today who has survived millions of years of evolution.”
Doug
And again,
Cinematic Quote
“Arnold Schwarzenegger Terminator Two: Judgment Day. This time, he's back for good.” “Trust me.”
Doug
And here we are today with the modern version of the trailer, which isn't just for movies anymore. And Dallas believes it's television trailers that have become the industry trailblazers.
Dallas
I kind of think of them as actually more forward thinking than movie trailers. I feel like the movie industry can get real stuck on the same type of sound all the time. And when you get results, you get results. With those streaming services, because of just the quantity of trailers that they're making, you end up seeing quite the difference in style, and it is really refreshing to work on those so consistently and realize it's not like the same trailer, you know, slams that go into a riser that then goes into a very loud nostalgic reimagining of a 80s or 90s track to the end. When there are so many trailers and so many marketing materials, it gets old even for the editors and stuff, but I kind of think of it as almost like the Marvelization of trailer stuff. And I think we're kind of approaching the end of like trailers just being like every one of them is over the top epic. So many trailers right now are just like, what are the most epic trailer slam sounds that we can put back to back to back to back because like we need to, we need to like pull back and like let trailers like create curiosity and like let people lean in a little bit more. Sonically, we say, you know, dialogue is King always. Communication is what's going to carry most of it. Everything else is kind of like the icing and the sprinkles around it.
Cinematic Quotes
“We have suffered to each other's hands. We have lost people we love at each other's hands.”
“This isn't about noble houses. This is about the living and the dead. And I intend to stay amongst the living.”
Doug
With some of the top dog streaming services like Netflix, each valued at over $100 billion. This is more than a fictional Game of Thrones. The battle is happening in real life right now across billions of screens around the world. Nielsen data paints a picture of streaming in the US. Let's look at the numbers from September 2021 to May 2022. If you combine the viewing of the big four US broadcasters: CBS, Fox, NBC and ABC, and the Big Five streaming services: Netflix, Hulu, Disney plus Prime Video and Apple TV Plus, there were more than 4 trillion minutes of viewing time. That's 203 hours for each of the 332 million US citizens. And that number doesn't include other power players like PBS, Univision, and plenty of others. It also doesn't factor in websites like YouTube. If you looked at all the pieces of the pie, estimate suggests that the total US consumption was more than 6 trillion minutes for that nine month period, which is 301 hours per person. So it's a monster of a business and it's only getting bigger.
Cinematic Quotes
“She's here to reclaim the Seven Kingdoms. The North is one of those seven kingdoms.” “Night King's army grows larger by the day. We need allies, powerful allies.”
Doug
Now at what point in production do they actually bring you in to make the trailer? Is everything finished and finalized?
Dallas
It depends on the circumstances like if we're working on like we did probably 50 Game of Thrones trailers for the last season going into that. And so it depends on what's being marketed. So if they're doing like recaps of old seasons, they have all that material. So they'll kind of compile everything, you know, put it together, they have more lead time on it. So there's more editing time. it gets to us. And you know, there's not really kind of like a high stress, we're using show splits that are already well processed and beautiful. And it's basically, behind the scenes on every TV show, or every movie that you've ever seen, there's the series of splits that has to be delivered. So you get to experience the 5.1 of the stereo. But every sound designer and mixer out there has to deliver things like voiceover cleanly mixed, dialogue, sound effects, music, and then there could be a bunch of other sub versions of that. So no matter what, if you hear a big musical score on something on Game of Thrones, they can still go back and just get the dialogue clean from that split.
Doug
So Dallas and his team, take the splits into the edit,
Dallas
and then they can kind of recraft an entire kind of story in tone.
Doug
For show recaps and behind the scenes, there's plenty of lead time before those videos are due.
Dallas
However, when we are working on shows, like Euphoria or Made for Love, or things that are like coming out, that is where things get really crunched because they're finishing production. They're editing the actual show, and they're trying to do the marketing at the same time. So in those situations, we oftentimes do get the actual mic right off of the boom or the lav.
Doug
Two quick definitions here: So a boom mic is a mic that's at the end of a long pole, and it's hidden just outside of the camera's shot. A lav mic is a wireless mic that's often hidden under the actors' clothing.
Dallas
In many trailers, it almost feels like it’s a shared credit between the editor, the visual editor, and the sound team. And so for us we want to get more, I don't know, ear candy uniqueness, but still kind of keep the same idea.
Doug
As much as trailers are seeking to get you and I to watch the TV or film they're promoting, authenticity is paramount. Promising the moon and delivering a dusty Styrofoam ball would crumble the system.
Dallas
There's a lot of money. And the last thing a filmmaker or writer or creator wants is bad marketing. You certainly have to have amazing writers, marketers, editors, sound people, you know, composers, a huge budget to push that where it needs to go to get it on everyone's radar. But at the end of the day, if the content sucks, it's just a problem. Then people stopped trusting the trailers and there's been a lot of stuff where I go, “Ooh, that's a really cool trailer.” I go check out the IMDB score and it's like a 4.7. And I'm like, “nope, not not watching that.” But when you get marketers super hyped about what's coming, they know how to market it pretty well.
Doug
In a world where our attention is day traded for the hottest new movie or TV show, we can't forget the behind the scenes creators who tugged at our curiosity in the first place. The folks like Dallas, whose sound design success into a trailer then ferries us along to our next big adventure or laugh or nail biting thrill. Sure, the autoplay trailers on Netflix can be super annoying, but they do their job and they do it well. With a pinch of art, a touch of science, and a heaping scoop of business, they fixate your focus, and invite you into your new favorite story. To learn more about Dallas Taylor, check out defactosound.com. And make sure you subscribe to 20,000 hertz wherever you get your podcasts. For more information about the show and where you can find us across the internet, check out our show notes or visit quickanddirtytips.com. Special thanks to the Quick and Dirty Tips team: Adam Cecil, our Audience Development and Podcast Manager; Morgan Christiansen, Podcast and Advertising Operations Specialist; Holly Hutchings, our Digital Operations Specialist; Davina Tomlin, Marketing and Publicity Assistant; and our intern Kamryn Lacy. Curious State is hosted and produced by me, Doug Fraser, for the Quick and Dirty Tips network, which is a division of Macmillan Publishers in partnership with Mignon Fogarty, Inc. Until next time, stay curious.