Research Into Teaser Trailers

What is a teaser trailer ?

A teaser trailer is a short trailer used to advertise an upcoming film, television program, video game or similar, usually released long in advance of the product, so as to "tease" the audience. They consist of a series of small, cryptic, challenging advertisements that anticipate a larger, full-blown campaign for a product launch or otherwise important event.Movie teasers, unlike typical theatrical trailers, are usually very short in length (between 30–60 seconds) and usually contain little, if any, actual footage from the film. Sometimes, it is merely a truncated version of a theatrical trailer. Teasers are usually only made for big-budget and popularly themed movies. Their purpose is less to tell the audience about a movie's content than simply to let them know that the movie is coming up in the near future.Teaser trailers are often made while the film is still in production or being edited and as a result they may feature scenes or alternate versions of scenes that are not in the finished film.

Above is a teaser trailer of the upcoming film, 'The Dark Knight Rises'.As seen in the trailer we can see the director has used footage from 'Batman Begins' and 'The Dark Knight' with a narrative over these scenes. There is only one new scene within the trailer where we see 'Gary Oldman' speaking in his hospital bed. It is ambiguous as to who he is speaking to and this is done clearly to grasp the audience's attention, wanting to know and watch further into the plot. As this film in particular is the last in its trilogy, the use of footage from the previous Batman films lets the viewers know that if they have been watching the the films up to this point, they will finally know the conclusion of the new film, the already seen footage demonstrating the journey that this film franchise has taken up to this point.

The Consistant Main Features
Edits are consistant throughout the teaser trailer, as minimal footage is shown to the audience. I have taken screenshots of the most noticable edits within the trailer.

This screen is the first thing the audience will see when watching any teaser trailer. It may vary depending on the type of studio producing the film, but it generally always tells the viewer that the footage shown in the teaser will be appropriate as there is usually only a soundtrack and quick footage shown.

Above is a great example of the use of edits within a teaser trailer, the trailer focusing on the use of fonts and short sentences to grip the audience. In this case the font fades onto the screen, the white font clearly standing out against the black background. Its important that the font can be clearly visbile to the audience, and it would defeat the trailers purpose if the audience couldnt see the text, therfore the use of contrasting colours helps significantly.

Above is the trademark of the teaser trailer, refering to the edits used demonstrating the logo of the film franchise.The viewer can clearly see the logo of the bat, key symbolism used, which allows the audience to identify and recognize this straight away and link it to previous films. \It is common for the title of the film to be revealed at the end of the trailer, and this is the same in this case. Fans of the franchise will be able to recognize straight away what the upcoming film is, just by identifying the characters used, i.e there are flashbacks within the trailer that show Christian Bale as Bruce Wayne in scenes from the first and second film of the trilogy.

The screenshot above shows the title of the film being introduced. The edits consist of using a fade in effect, and with the use of the black on white background it allows the font to be seen clearly making it easily visible to the viewer. The use of theses colours can also reflect the batman genre in general, not just focusing on the film but other batman related products that could perhaps bring more attention to the upcoming film.
As seen in the artwork below, we can see the same prominent colour scheme used to reflect the batman genre, and it is effective as the characters within the artwork can be seen clearly and stand out to the target audience. Examples of the artwork can be seen below, although there are more out there each focusing on different characters.