Teaser trailer

A teaser trailer, or teaser is a short trailer used to advertise an upcoming movie, game or television series.

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. They are usually released long in advance of the film they advertise.

Teaser trailers 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, and to add to the hype of the upcoming release. 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. Other ones (notable Pixar films) have scenes made for use in the trailer only. Teaser trailers today are increasingly focused on internet downloading and the convention circuit.

An early example of the teaser trailer was the one for the "Superman" film by Richard Donner. The film was already nearly a year late; it was designed to re-invigorate interest in the release. The teaser for the "Batman" film starring Michael Keaton in 1989 was an emergency marketing move that successfully convinced angered comic book fans that the film would respect the source material.Fact|date=February 2007

Recent examples of major motion picture events that used teaser trailers to gain hype are the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, the Disney/Pixar film "Cars", the newer "Star Wars" films and the "Spider-Man" films. "The Da Vinci Code" teaser trailer was released before a single frame of the movie had been shot.Fact|date=August 2007 Another recently released teaser trailer is Twilight, based on the book by Stephenie Meyer. It was released after, with a minimum amount of footage shown. The movie Twilight will be released on November 21, 2008.

Some teasers have appeared over a year (or longer) prior to the movie's release date. (For example, a teaser for "The Incredibles" was attached to the May 2003 film "Finding Nemo", a full 18 months before "The Incredibles" was released.)

A teaser for "" was attached to the film "The Siege", and it was reported that many people had paid for admission to the film just to watch the trailer, and had walked out after the trailer had screened [http://www.cnn.com/SHOWBIZ/Movies/9811/20/star.wars.01/] . The teaser trailer for "Cloverfield" was first publicly shown attached to the film "Transformers". At this point, nothing about the film was known, and the one-and-a-half-minute teaser did not include the movie title; only the producer's name, J. J. Abrams and a release date, 1.18.08, were shown.

Many DVD versions of movies will have both their teaser and theatrical trailers. One of the more notable exceptions to this rule is "Spider-Man", whose teaser trailer featured a mini-movie plot of bank robbers escaping in a helicopter, getting caught from behind and propelled backward into what at first appears to be a net, then is shown to be a gigantic spider web spun between the two towers at the World Trade Center. After the 9/11 attacks, the trailer and associated teaser poster (where the two towers appear in as a reflection in Spider-Man's eyepieces) were pulled from distribution in theaters and have never been released on DVD. Conducting a search on YouTube under "Spider-man Banned Trailer" will show the teaser trailer in its entirety. One of the reasons for the name "teaser" is because they are shown usually a long time (one or one and a half years) before the movie comes out, so as to "tease" the audience.

Many teaser trailers are similar to TV spots, except that they appear in movie theatres.

See also

*Film trailerTeasers are also commonly used in advertising. The so-called teaser ad/campaign consists typically in (a series of) small, cryptic, challenging, advertisements which anticipate a large(r), full-blown campaign for a product launch or otherwise important event.

A common and well know video is Alex Gackle's movie trailer.

External links

*http://teaser-trailer.com/