Trailers (for sale or rent)

making posters is an even more specialist skill!

A friend suggested I really should be using instagram - for videos - which means 15 second cuts: as if 1 minute wasn't enough of a challenge...
I started by trying to make a 15 second narrative (which in a couple of cases was actually possible as they had started out extremely short and with a fairly non-narrative kind of narrative) but for most of the ideas, the challenge was finding the good bits (visual) weren't necessarily the good bits of narrative. It emphasised the inseparable nature of the visuals and the narrative - which is good - but also helped with thinking about how shots or ideas could be re-ordered without unravelling the story. Some film festivals ask for trailers, and I always think...that's mad, a trailer for a 2 minute movie...but actually that is a more helpful way of looking at 15 seconds extracted from a short short. It's not about condensing the whole story... or extracting the "best" 15 seconds of visuals (because that may not tell a story, may not have pace... oh wait, how can they be the best visuals if they dont have pace? Then they are only 2 dimensional). So a better comparison/ starting point might be to look at the images I chose to extract for the screenshot web pages - a series of images which tell parts of the story but don't reveal the ending, and which are chosen for their variety as well as the strength of the images themselves, and the way they carry the narrative sense. But trying to put them together as a series of sequences rather than stills...aaaargh! Starting to really appreciate why storyboarding is a specialist skill and so is producing trailers.
UPDATE: a very useful training session from Tom Armitage, via Northern Film and Media, about creative ways to use the web to promote/ contextualise/ raise interest in/ support and reinforce your film work... I think I might actually be heading in the right direction...

What did we learn today?

Normally, I work from beginning to end, perhaps more like writing a novel than making a film. I make a first draft - seldom a pencil test unless it's really hard to draw - and then go back over it, to re-edit, also in order beginning to end. BUT - Just because it's a cartoon, doesn't mean you can't shoot it out of sequence. So, what did we learn today... stop banging your head against the sketchbook going "wah! it's too hard to draw a little fat man doing 360 degree rolls in mid air" and - duh - move on to to the part where he's admiring his wings in the mirror. Go back to the hard part when you are feeling more energetic, have better references...or maybe rethink the sequence based on what it is supposed to show/generate/ suggest. Of course this does imply you have to have a reasonable idea where the story is going...

A proper storyboard is not in fact essential unless you want to ...maybe, work to a pre-planned deadline.
Lately I have  started annotating the cartoon-in-progress with days so I can see how many frames I actually managed in that period. This will be an invaluable aid to planning and resource budgetting  - or possibly invoke despair.