Western Shootout Trailer

This trailer is more of an experiment than an actual trailer. The basic story was that two cowboys met in the middle of a desert and had a shootout. It was inspired by the track "Tazarine" from the soundtrack to the film Babel. However, I don't live any where near a desert and so that changed things right from the start.

The adapted plan was to film it in my village and instead of using actual guns, the cowboys would use their hands to make a gun shape. However, I did want to use some cowboy costumes in the film but since I didn't own any I would have to buy some. I started to realise that if I was going to film it then it would take a while to get everything together.

But I couldn't wait. The reason being because I wanted to use a big tracking shot to open the film with and I couldn't wait to try it out. However, I had to figure out how to pull a tracking shot off since I didn't have any special equipment such as a dolly and when you walk with the camera it shakes around a lot which would completely destroy the image I wanted to create. I ended up sitting in a wheel barrow with the camera and getting a friend to push the wheel barrow.

This is how the trailer was born. I wanted to try out the method I had come up with and since it was very short notice I couldn't get any one to star in it and so used my mums dress making dummy as the main cowboy. I dressed it in some of my clothes and used a balloon for the its' head.

The second cowboy I found in the garage and was less of an effort to put together which is why the second cowboy looks pretty rubbish. However, realism wasn't the point of making the trailer, the camera movement was.

The opening camera movement in the trailer from 0:00 to 0:35 is pretty much exactly what I imagined the opening shot of the actual shootout to be like. However, I would have extended the beginning back about another 10 seconds. The rest of the trailer isn't an exact copy of the actual film idea but instead is just stuff I thought up on the day of shooting the trailer.

Even though I did put "coming 2008" at the end of the trailer, therefore giving myself lots of time to actually put it together, I've decided to trash this project since I've moved on to bigger and better things. Ultimately not filming the real thing has worked out okay anyway because I've gained experience from making the trailer.

So instead of being a trailer this was actually an experiment to increase my film making skills. And I for one think that it has definitely worked, and I now find experimenting is often the best way for me to learn, instead of having to come up with story lines every single time you want to try something new. This way I can make mistakes and it doesn't really effect the finished thing in the end because they aren't really made for an audience anyway.

However, saying that I would still like to make the full short and there is still a possibility of me revisiting it in the future.