You’ve probably seen the creatively edited trailer for “The Shining”, called “Shining” (The competition that spawned it is discussed at Making Light, by the way.) There were quite a few entries in that competition, and “Shining” was clearly the best of them.

So what makes a good creatively edited trailer? It’s not merely enough to pick the spookiest and darkest moments of a romantic comedy, and put scary music over it. The most fun to be had is when the scenes, taken out of context, perfectly fit the new theme while viciously undercutting what they were *supposed* to mean. “Shining” has these moments in spades. The son looking up at room 237, yearning to make contact with Dad. Jack kissing the woman in the shower, cut short enough that you might imagine it was Shelley. The crayon “redruM” on the door, simply a precocious kid looking for attention.

Here is a more recent example - in my view, even better than “Shining”. Look for “Brokeback to the Future” in the “videos” section.

It makes me want to do one of these. I’ve always loved this kind of willful misinterpretation (The Wizard of Oz: “A young girl travels to a surrealistic landscape, kills a woman, then conspires with three strangers to rob and kill the woman’s sister.” Also, my friend Chris wrote a lovely interpretation of the Star Wars series.) But now that my DVD collection has hit critical mass, and transferring them onto computer and editing them have become a piece of cake, my only excuses are time and creative talent.

Hmm. Perhaps I should start a competition. I’ll get back to you all on this one…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 8th, 2006 at 11:34 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.