The history of movie trailer

The history of movie trailerBy Georgia Gibbs

The BeginningThe first movie theater was in 1910s and only had one screen. You could sit and watch for as long as you liked as there was not set times for screenings and the films/cartoons were on a continuous loop. The fee was only 5 cent!

The first movie trailer- 19131913 was the year of a first movie trailer as an idea of promotion, they were basic trailers and only had small snippets from the film as trailers had a low production value so no one spent much on these productions.

Nils Granlundmade a short promotional film with showcasing of therehearsalfootage and this idea ofpromotion during 'adverts' became well adopted.

Who started them?Most of these promotions/ trailers were originally produced by the theaters themselves. By1916, the movie studios began officially releasing small trailers for upcoming movies. These first film trailers were pretty basic they generally consisted of snippets from the film with some text.

An example

Here are some of the very first film trailers, which are very basic and only use text overlay and snippets from the film it is promoting.

1920sCompanies had started to create their own trailers in the 1920s and used a template style that involved simple editing. Studios used a company called National screen service to distribute the trailersThis included screen wipes and slide in titles. This showed an evolution of trailers emerging, for example the well renowned King Kong.

King Kong trailer 1993

NSS (national screen service) dominated the trailer making business from the 1920s through to the 60s, other companies such as warner bros experimented though. The NSS created a template style trailer with stylistic patterns like screen wipes and fly-in titles as shown in this trailer.

1960sIn the 1960s Alfred Hitchcock changed the way trailers were made and shaped future production of trailers.He produced the trailer Psycho as a tour around the scenes with commentary to show the audience what toe expect from the film.

Psycho trailer 1960

1964Editing within trailers had began to evolve hugely. This is as they were using editing of higher quality such as: quick cut editing, slide editing and zooming in and out. This was adapted along with music and dramatic emphasis on the typography overlay more so than the footage. Making the sounds and text dramatic to coordinate with the footage.

1970s The era of blockbusters- The realise of Jaws showed that advertising was key to making the film a blockbuster with the use of an anti-hero in the trailer along with colour and more music, which marked the trailer more of a bait to the customer.This was unlike previous trailers as they had normally only been previewed in a city and then some smaller areas but Jaws changed this as it was widely released.

Jaws- The first blockbusterJaws was shown in around 470 theatres in the US 1975, the biggest opening movie ever due to the trailer. It achieved $7 million in the first weekend of its release.This was the birth of the blockbuster era, companies would now attempt to follow Jaws and create bolder visuals and bold voice-overs to commentate the action content the trailer of the movie.

Jaws- the first blockbuster

The evolutionTodays trailers have evolved hugely from what they once were with higher production values and use of technology such as CGI.Fast paced edits with voiceovers, music, speech and text overlay are what we experience todayThe progressive use of internet and TV means that global distribution is immediate.Trailers are now a moving motion representing the film it is promoting.It is easily consumed as a preview before the main attraction and is easily sharable on social media.

Inception an example of todays trailer