That is what the entrants in the Trailer Fest Film Festival are challenged to achieve. At Trailer Fest, the trailer is the movie. The first edition of the festival will take place 6 p.m. Sunday at the Buskirk-Chumley Theater.
“Making a fake trailer is an interesting exercise as a filmmaker,” festival director Chris Rall said. “You have to conceive an entire movie but then only pick small shots to film so that you can make an effective short story.”
Rall said interest in fake trailers was sparked throughout the world when the winning submissions of a fake trailer competition at South by Southwest were turned into Quentin Tarantino films.
Trailer Fest’s final cut of 31 trailers from 49 submitted include trailers from Australia, Belgium, Hong Kong, the Czech Republic and the United Kingdom, as well as several from Bloomington.
One of the participants from Bloomington is Mark Bell, who teaches an introductory film class for grades nine through 11 at Harmony School.The first project assigned to his students this school year was to make a submission for the festival. The finished product was titled “The Kids From #Planet.”
“Our trailer is a comedy that takes ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ and mashes it with ‘21 Jump Street,’” Bell said. “An FBI agent’s daughter is kidnapped by students at the school that turn out to be aliens, and he goes undercover at the school to try to find them.”
The students had to contribute their own ideas for the trailer and put them together, Bell said. The trailer took three weeks to film and edit.
“I think our trailer is entertaining and funny,” Bell said. “My students did a great job, we had fun doing it, and they learned a lot. So, to me, we’ve already won.”
Another entry, “Crying Out Loud 4,” was created by Bloomington residents Charlie Jones, who acted in the piece, and Eric Ayotte, who filmed and edited it. Jones and Ayotte also collaborate on the monthly film event Instant Gratification Movie Challenge through the Gadabout traveling film festival, which will kick off Nov. 13 in Bloomington.
Ayotte said the inspiration for their trailer came from a monthly challenge theme, “For crying out loud.”
They wanted to play on the wording of the theme to create a comical mood as if it came from a series of bad movies, Jones said.
“It’s mocking trailers and a few genres of films all in one,” Jones said. “It’s an indie-teen-drama turned horror, a mash of stereotypical trailers. It’s making a joke from some serious films that are out there.”
Ayotte created the Gadabout festival to encourage people to produce original content, he said. He said he became interested in creating his own short films in high school, and he wants to promote people who make films that are less commercial than box office hits.
“The thing I find most exciting about Trailer Fest is that it’s something different, unique and original,” Ayotte said. “These curated programs for short films make for a much more interesting evening than going to the regular cinema where you only see high-budget stuff. A lot more creativity goes into it than people think.”
The winners of each category and the winner of overall highest score will be decided by three judges as well as the audience. The prize for each category winner is $200, and the overall winner receives an extra $250. The fact that so many entries were sent in from all around the world despite the relatively small reward shows the public’s interest in fake trailers as a form of entertainment, Rall said.
“I think it’s an intriguing concept, and I don’t know of any other film festivals that focus specifically on fake movie trailers,” Rall said. “I think it’s going to be really entertaining, and we want to keep it going in the future.”
