Lessons From Low Budget Christmas Movie Trailers

I've been watching a lot of low budget Christmas movies lately which means I've also watched a lot of their trailers. It's been an often amusing and illuminating experience since most of my trailer intake consists of big budget Hollywood films, and AAA and indie game trailers. They've helped me see just how much of a difference many key trailer editing concepts can make. 

Don't overwhelm the audience.

I've said before that everything in a trailer has to butt up against each other including: dialogue, sound effects, music and visuals. This trailer is a good example of the extreme this can go in, and why that is not a hard and fast rule. It's important to consider the amount of time the audience needs to digest an idea before you move onto the next one. The dialogue in this trailer is cut at an absolutely breakneck pace, and oftentimes fights for attention with the title cards. This trailer feels to me like one which believes I am a cup to be filled with information no matter the pace or means by which the information is poured in.

This is the story as told in the trailer (minus some very minor scenes sprinkled throughout)

A girl wrote a letter to Santa saying she's been sad since her mom died; she wants Santa to send her a woman to make her dad happy. The wind blows her letter into the hands of a woman (Amy Acker) who decides she could be the person this girl wants, so she tries to insinuate her into the father's life. There's a rival love interest for the father's affections, the father later discovers Amy Acker has his daughter's letter and accuses her of deception. The trailer ends with Amy Acker trying to figure out how to resolve the situation, and it makes look like it ends happily.

The trailer title cards' say throughout the trailer: "An uptown girl goes downtown in search of a miracle. Johnson Production Group in association with ITV Studios America. A story of love and miracles."

This is a lot considering it's cut on top of very fast paced dialogue and visuals.

The pace of this trailer is absolutely RELENTLESS. I feel like there are Hollywood blockbuster action movie trailers which don't try to cram this much story in, and certainly not at this pace. The dialogue pace alone is impossibly hard to follow with little to no moments to breathe. Nevermind the fact the visuals are also telling a story, but often they move onto a new plot point before the dialogue finishes its own thought. On top of THAT there are title cards which are also moving onto another story idea which the visuals or dialogue also frequently don't directly connect to.

Trying to to uncover the story details of this trailer was incredibly difficult even with repeated viewings and the YouTube transcript; it's SO jam packed. It feels like someone took the entire trailer, and used the "Close Gaps" command in Premiere Pro. This is the perfect example of a trailer "run on sentence" I talked about in this post about accents and punctuation.

Let's look at another Christmas movie example:

Guide the audience through the story

This trailer is not quite as relentlessly paced as Dear Santa's but the storytelling is difficult to follow due to the order of events and because the trailer doesn't seem to delineate when it's moved onto a new story idea. There are also tonal issues where at one point the story feels like it's going to turn from a family drama into a thriller.

The story is: two single parents discover their daughters are rivals to perform a solo during the school Christmas show. The problem is, the different points are so jumbled that even though I knew the plot summary upon first viewing, I quickly got disoriented. Here's roughly the order of event based on the dialogue and visuals:

A blond teen girl and her mom set up Christmas decorations.

The blond is out with friends; they discover she has a great singing voice and encourage her to be part of the chorus.

A brunette teen girl is talking to her divorced father; she's upset because her mother isn't showing up to something (she suspects it's because of a new boyfriend)

The parents of the kids bump into each other at a store, they're introduced as Nate and Jennifer.

The brunette asks a teacher who is singing the solo at the Christmas festival. The teacher says there are going to be auditions. The brunette struts through the halls with her entourage. She confronts the blond and says since they're both competing for the solo she figures they should meet (this is the first indication the brunette is interested in auditioning)

Jennifer talks to Nate; she says Christina (we don't know who this is) told her Nate is recently divorced. Jennifer says her husband died two years ago, she understands wanting a perfect Christmas, and that this is the first Christmas since moving from San Francisco.

Nate comes home and confronted by his daughter the brunette; she's upset he didn't tell her he was going on a date. Meanwhile Nate talks to a friend who says Melissa is struggling. (The trailer doesn't very clearly show us the brunette is Melissa, but I checked IMDB and she is)

Melissa confronts the blond, accusing her of thinking she's better than her. Nate's friend ponders what will happen if Melissa knows anger is the only way to solve problems; he worries they'll "lose" her. 

There's a thriller-like turn where Melissa is hassling the blond, spray painting their garage and spilling water on her. 

Jennifer confronts Nate and says if his daughter is behaving this way, he's not the man she thought he was. Meanwhile Melissa and the blond find each other in the restroom with tears streaming down both of their faces. 

Melissa tells her father she wants her mother to want to spend Christmas with her. The blond says her dad used to say Christmas is hope and a new beginning and that maybe Melissa needs those things more than she does. This is juxtaposed with shots of the characters seemingly making up and getting along.

Some of these shots say a lot by using familiar genre shots, but this moment which feels like a "The popular girls" shot isn't even expanded upon in the trailer.

The order of events is very confusing especially if you don't have someone walking through the plot points in text. For example, when Melissa mentions the Christmas solo, we have no idea why she's bringing it up until later she mentions she's also auditioning. We also don't need to know the characters' names, so that information muddies the waters a bit, especially when Melissa's name is introduced by someone we haven't met up until that point. 

The details about Melissa's relationship with her mother are also peripheral to the main plot, and yet the trailer focuses heavily on that information. If the trailer focused more on the rivalry between the two girls, and used the parents as the sub plot I think it would've been clearer. But instead it intercuts the two stories which makes it difficult to parse any of it.

On top of the basic sequence of story events being difficult to understand, the lack of trailer editing punctuation and sectioning of story ideas means they all meld together into a soup of plot points. As the audience, we're trying to form connections between scenes, and when the trailer doesn't tell us they've moved onto another idea, it takes a lot of attention to then separate the scenes in our heads, but in the time we're trying to do that the trailer has probably moved onto another point entirely. The trailer is basically a person who changes topics mid conversation without missing a beat, except that person is also showing you moving images as part of the story.

This moment is confusing not only because of the tonal shift, but because we can't read what was written on the garage. "KEEP YOUR FLLA" ?

The stories of many of these Christmas movies are not terribly intricate, and yet a lot of the trailers are very disorienting. If you're interested in making story trailers, I'd recommend analyzing the trailers for Christmas movies available on Amazon Prime and Hulu especially (Netflix's films seem to have better trailers). If the trailers leave you as confused as I feel right now, it might be fun to figure out what would've made the story clearer. Is it simply a matter of more stylized trailer editing or is the basic sequence of events told in a confusing way?

Next week I'm sharing my favorite cinematic game trailers for 2020 and my favorite gameplay trailers the following week. If you have some of your own favorites please send them! I watched a lot of trailers this week, but I'm sure I missed some along the way, so I'd love to see your favorites.

Happy holidays!