History Of Action Trailers & Technical Analysis

The action genre really became popular around the 1970s. One of the first action trailers was Dirty Harry which was made in 1971. It differs greatly from the action trailers of today because it has very long clips of up to 45 seconds when modern action film trailers have clips that lasts no more than 10-20 seconds. Modern film trailers can have upwards of 50 scenes in one trailer whereas the Dirty Harry trailer has just 5 different scenes. The sound in the film trailer is mostly diegetic which is also different to action film trailers nowadays as they use lots of non diegetic sounds. One of the main features of the Dirty Harry trailer is that they keep mentioning the main star Clint Eastwood, this is to make people go and see the film. The problem of this trailer is that it reveals too much of the films plot, the reason i feel for this is that in the 70's they couldn't add complex special effects to the film so they rely on showing more of the conversational action rather than explosions etc.

Still in the next decade the action film trailers of the time didn't develop too much. For example the 1983 film Scarface which introduces the main character Antonio Montana in a similar way to how Dirty Harry introduces Clint Eastwood. This is also to draw attention to the fact that the film has a star playing its main character. Yet again the trailer has a slow build up of dialogue filled scenes which in truth tend to drag on slightly. A fair bit of plot information is given away but not as much as there was given away in Dirty Harry. The beginning of what we would call modern action film trailers began with the film Die Hard made in 1989. This has a huge amount of the trailer being just action which is a lot different to Scarface which was made just 6 years earlier. Another difference Die Hard has to Scarface is the fact that they don't try to plug the actor over the film they just let the action speak for itself.

A film that really uses a lot of modern action film trailer genre conventions is Transporter 3. This film was made in 2008 and the trailer builds up slowly until it bursts into life with lots of action throughout benefiting from a wealth of special effects. This also uses a lot of non diegetic sound as they now have techniques which make the adding of sound from outside the film appear seamless.

Overall i think the main differences in the film trailers we have looked at is that modern trailers benefit from lots of special effects and film producing techniques which the older trailers could not have benefited from.

Technical analysis
The first trailer I studied in detail was Gamer. The trailer lasts 2min 31secs and includes 46 different scenes with 140 different shots. This gives an average of 3 shots per scene. It includes certain action film iconography like explosions and guns/weaponry. Also a fast motorbike is shown as a pose to a fast car seen in many action films.
I also studied the Dirty Harry trailer in detail. The trailer lasts 1min 52secs and includes 19 different scenes. There are 71 different shots included in this film. That is an average of 4 shots per scene. The examples of action film iconography used in the trailer are guns and cars crashing into buildings.
The next trailer i studied was the James Bond film Casino Royale.