Watch the first ever trailer to Stranger Things Studios' YouTube channel. Stranger Things Studios is a Minnesota YouTube team that has been making short online movies since 2011.
The trailer features some of our earliest works, as well as glimpses of movies that have not yet been released. Check back over the next few months to see them as they come out!
*Special Note: To find pictures to accompany this post, I dug through my personal collection of all our productions. Enjoy some of this behind-the-scenes and iconic shots :-)
I knew that if I was going to return to film making that I wanted to come back strong. I wanted to start out with a Stranger Things Studios trailer - a showcase of everything we've done, using our best moments across as many of our movies as possible.
I put a lot of pressure on myself to make this video tell everyone that who we are, what we could do, and that we were back in action. It had to be good, and just as importantly, it had to be seen. To do that, we needed to warm up the market. Dropping a video unannounced after two years of inactively sounded like the perfect way to fail. So, in June, two months prior to the intended release date, we started posting activity on the Facebook page again. Then, I decided that maybe we should make a "pre-trailer" first - a kind of a throwaway teaser video to catch people's attention. That pre-trailer became "Wraiths and Shadow."
Even that became a little precious to me, and I wanted to prep people for that video, too. That led to a Facebook exclusive teaser video dubbed "STS Returns." If you think about it, STS Returns is a commercial to a teaser to a trailer to whatever movies are to come in the future. That's like a pre-pre-trailer.
While all this was going on, I was trying to rebuild the team. I found the perfect way to do it, too! One of the challenges I faced with this kind of trailer was coming up with a story to tell. Normally, a trailer is for a specific film, and it tells people something of the plot. With what I wanted to do with this video - showcase all the films we've ever made - I couldn't come up with a thread to link them all together.
Ultimately, I took the music from the final Star Wars: The Force Awakens trailer and make up a mock trailer as a test run. It took me about 45 minutes, and it was pretty solid. In fact, it worked so well that it got me really excited to be back at it.
Naturally - and sadly - I can never use it or share it online. For one, copyright. Also, I didn't want whatever trailer we ultimately made to have to compete with a Star Wars themed trailer. We'd be kicking our own ass.
But I had to share it. So, first I sent it to Randy, my composer. (I send almost everything to Randy first). Before he replied, he had watched it several times himself, and now he was just as pumped as I was to be back to making movies again.
And then I shared it with the team. It was the best decision I could have made. The responses coming back at me, the excitement and support, the people emerging from obscurity to say "count me in!" was awe-striking and inspiring. In the course of a night, I had made a video, and with it rallied everyone back together.
Now to do the same with our fan base!
Unlike any other film we've done before, there was no filming to be done. Instead, I had to sift back through the archives of raw footage and the collection of films that we had made for the perfect moments to use. What's more, I wanted to use footage from movies that were in production as a way to catch people's attention and say, "whoa, what's that movie?!" All said in done, the oldest film I used was Ashes of Man, which we released in August of 2012; the newest is a movie slotted for some time during summer of 2017.
Another thing about the trailer that was completely different than any movie before was that it wasn't about the footage. It was really about the music. I don't think people realize how important music can be for a movie. Sometime - most times, really - the music is the thing that makes or breaks a piece. With a trailer, it's the music that drives the power and energy of the story. The music is the trailer.
Randy and I ripped apart the music for almost two months. Usually, we only have had about 2-3 weeks to turn a piece around, and even then we hit our deadline and say, "it's good enough. Let's go with it." Honestly, if we had more time, we'd never get anything done. We'd just pick at the same thing forever.
Well, we had that "more time" this time, and we picked at that thing forever. Very little of the original piece still remains in the final cut. I think the first cut was about 5 minutes long, and relied heavily on the Minnesota: Winterscapes theme. It was beautiful, but it was too long. It also didn't seem like the right theme. When I think about our movies and the music, two themes always stand out in my mind that make me say, "That's Stranger Things Studios." Both of them are present in the final cut. The music is a glorified and epic version of the theme from Armory, but you can also hear influences from Banak the Brave if you listen to it closely enough.
The trailer got postponed so many times for so many reasons, but ultimately the real reason was that it had to be perfect. It may not have performed as well as I would have liked, but in my mind, it is perfect, it's something I can use to introduce Stranger Things Studios to new people, and it's one of the finest pieces Randy has turned out, in my opinion. What he's written since has only gotten more impressive. Check out Zombie FPS, listen to the soundtrack, and see what I mean.
Like I said, music is the thing that makes or breaks a piece. It's hard to make a piece without him.
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