ASFA filmmaking teacher Damian Lahey has just released the trailer for his new documentary project, “Pillars of Lost Futures.” The film is shot in Tunisia, the northernmost country of Africa and home to many archeological sites of ancient Roman structures that now lay in ruins. You can watch the trailer above.
“The film is about a westerner who, while reflecting upon the ruins of Tunisia, sees parallels between that and the fate of his own nation,” Lahey tells The Star, adding that the documentary explores themes of “mythology and the roots of multiculturalism.”
The trailer shows footage from these ancient sites, sweeping shots of the Tunisian landscape littered with stone remains of buildings and monuments, some crumbled to pieces while others stand tall, unmoved. The footage is accompanied by a voiceover from narrator Cullen Moss, speaking the images to life with poetic quotes discussing the ideas at the heart of the film.
“I look upon this majestic corpse, its holiness, its unfulfilled promise, its clashing of cultures,” Moss reads, “and I am looking at the future of my own land.”
Lahey recently used the video to teach students in his Movie Madness elective about some of the key elements that make a film trailer truly effective.
“With any trailer you want to lure people in and then drop them,” he says. “You want to give people a taste, but you don’t want all of your high spots to be in it.”
Students were taught the basics of Adobe Premiere with Lahey’s video as example, making their own versions of the trailer with the same software he originally used. They also went over some of the necessary steps and extra thought that goes into releasing a trailer in the modern world of film.
“When you put together a trailer in the modern age, you have to think of every element,” says Lahey, “the thumbnail image for Youtube, the description for the video, everything.”
It’s these smaller factors that are crucial in today’s online environment, adding up to create an efficient and compelling trailer that will both inform and intrigue viewers in such a short period of time.
According to Mr. Lahey, the majority of the footage has already been shot this past summer and the complete feature-length documentary is set to be complete some time in the next year.
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