Film Distribution Project A Level - "END" Trailer & Teaser written by Agavni Mehrabi

"I always come back..."
-William "Springtrap" Afton, Five Nights at Freddy's

I am indeed back and kicking it with some new tubular film projects, yo.

Recently, we have completed a film distribution project which consisted of marketing/distributing an upcoming film written by a student in a Creative Writing class. The distribution plan consisted of a trailer, teaser, and key art (which are attached at the bottom of this post).

The prompt we received was a sci-fi drama written by student Agavni Mehrabi, a story about a girl named Rose whose friend gets drafted for an planetary search party amongst rising temperatures due to climate change in the year 2085. Amongst the various prompts to select from, my group decided upon this one because it had elements which we liked (sci-fi) and would pose interesting technical challenges to accomplish. Admittedly, we hit a creative block after the first day of discussing film plans as we realized this feat would be more difficult than expected, leading to a nearly last-minute filming schedule. Despite setbacks and stress, however, we created a final product which is magnitudes better than we expected due to the creative work-arounds our group came up with in the end.

Firstly, we were confused how we were going to find a "spaceship" to film in. If we were to create a set for this, it would require tedious prep time which we couldn't spare, and if we were to just leave it out of the production we were confused how we would segue between the different plot elements. We even messaged the writer to ask if we could skip over the spaceship scene and her response was to maybe focus more on the drama aspect rather than the sci-fi aspect. Luckily, we found someone who was willing to give us a set that looked like a spaceship at Becon TV, a student television/film facility. Due to this, we were able to add equal amounts of sci-fi and drama aspects without sacrificing one or the other.

Another aspect which we tried to focus on to make the film look better in limited time was to focus on an interesting visual aesthetic, settling on a cyberpunk-1950s pastiche look which mixed the looks of films like Bladerunner 2049 and pieces like Pleasantville. We believed this to be an interesting aesthetic to focus on since it is a crossover which is uncommon in today's times, with modern sci-fi dramas such as Stranger Things consisting of a 1980s aesthetic which we thought was highly saturated in modern media. 

Overall, our piece consisted of a lot of compromises and new technical skills in order to achieve with the materials we had. Although stressful, our group had tons of fun filming END and we ended up with a piece which was better than we expected. If I were to take anything from this experience, I have learned that trailers are HARD. Maybe if you have a full film it would be easier, but filming snippets of a story and hoping it will come together coherently is a challenge much harder than anticipated and it required a new level of thinking and planning in order to come up with something that makes sense. Another key thing, start filming earlier!