What is it about?
Film trailers remain big business, representing the main way that audiences learn about the content of forthcoming feature films (and other audio-visual media, from television programmes to video games). While film trailers have been around for over 100 years, trailers for films in OTHER media (television, radio, etc.) have been around for less time, and have different medium-specific approaches that are often overlooked in favour of the "coming soon" film trailer. This article considers the case of the radio trailer, through a case study of trailers produced and broadcast in the UK radio industry: it describes the different types of radio trailer available, and considers how the audio-only medium affects the trailer's usual reliance on a montage of movie clips.
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Why is it important?
Radio trailers are an overlooked element of film advertising / promotional campaigns, often having to compress their sales messages into smaller, 30- or 40-second slots. This clearly affects the amount of information that can be included, and has an impact on what impression an audience might form of the forthcoming film. The radio trailer also has different stylistic approaches not found as often in other media trailers - the use of vox-pops, review quotations, and (occasionally) dense and layered audio tracks.
Perspectives
This was an important piece for me to write, as while there is a lot of work on film trailers there is less on television or radio trailers that run alongside those film trailers. I hope it opens up a new area of media trailers that people may not have thought about, and offers a starting point for additional work.
Dr Keith Mark Johnston
University of East Anglia
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Sound and (No) Vision, Music Sound and the Moving Image, October 2014, Liverpool University Press,
DOI: 10.3828/msmi.2014.10.
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