How to make our trailer shareable and attract a new audience while maintaining its primary function: make people want to attend the event?
The event trailers usually get limited social media traction and aren’t shared a lot. They are valuable to those who watch them (captive audiences in theatres or online ads), but no-value-added trailers with a mixing of different films and series would have little virality. Also, a limited media budget would not allow us to rely on sponsored posts to ensure the online promotion of the festival so we had to bet everything on creativity.
House of Greenland produced a trailer for the Franco-British TV series festival ‘Totally Serialized’, hosted by the French Cultural Institute in London. Conceived similarly to a mashup, the trailer was based on a full soundtrack bespokely created by including quotes of each series trailer. The video ultimately defined the visual design of the festival and its originality / shareability contributed to a 30% increase of the event sales.
The constraints of the ready-picked quotes and very short shots from the trailer House of Greenland had as footage made the edit both a tightrope walking challenge and an exhilarating exercise. It resulted in a fast paced yet profound trailer, that showcased beautifully each series while making them look like different pieces of the same puzzle.
“Composing music for this trailer was as interesting as it was challenging because it represented the starting point in the entire creative process. I first tried to imagine the final film and a visual rhythm so I could move on to building a structure integrating the soundbites from the TV series. I also wanted the theme to be fun, though slightly melancholic, to keep in line with the wide range of genres covered by the festival. The imitation of an old blues recording and lyrical strings combined with looped breakbeats and bass make for a characteristic cinematic hip-hop track, in the vein of the two popular French bands Wax Tailor and C2C.”
- Raphae, Music Composer.
13,000 views (vs. 197 views for the 2015 trailer)
Watch rate 3 times higher than benchmark
Contributed to a 30% increase in ticket sales
1500 views, 25 likes and 35 shares on Facebook (no shares and only 3 likes in 2015)
Great reactions at Ciné Lumière, the host of the event!