A funny thing happens when you’re waiting months and months for someone else to tinker with your movie: you get antsy. And so, after hearing the cast ask again and again when a trailer would be ready, we figured now would be a good time to put our antsiness to use and make a trailer. And by “we,” I mean “Matt.”

And by “trailer,” I mean a proper trailer, not the teaser we shot way back in October 2010 (yeesh), before we had a cast or crew, let alone actual movie footage to show off. No, this is a real trailer, one built to give audiences an actual sense of what’s to come from the final product (whenever that final product may actually arrive).

I had a few ideas for what I’d want the trailer to be, and I sent some notes to Matt along with instructions to dig up random goofy clips for a montage. Knowing Matt’s sense of humor, I knew he’d pick the right shots. I also should’ve known he’d ignore my notes and put together something even better than I had suggested. (It took me about half a second, tops, to go from “hey, that’s not what I said” to “oh, wait, this is what I should’ve asked for in the first place.”)

We went through five or six rough cuts of the trailer (I’ve lost count), with Matt working on them in his spare time (which was scarce, but we’re in no hurry here) and me emailing him random notes as they popped into my head, driving him nuts with constant nitpicks like “hey, change this word.” The only major alteration from Matt’s original cut was a tightening of the opening section (it was about twice as long as it is in the final version). Everything else was just a matter of fine tuning. Because when you have an editor that good and you let him loose to do his thing, there’s very little to worry about after.

The last step in the trailer is mucking about with the video quality itself. At Ryan’s request, we’ll be testing out how much grain and filtering needs done to keep the image from looking too “clean” – that is, too much like hi-def video that it’s distracting and cheap-looking. Doing the tests now allows us to try out a look and receive feedback without having to mess with the entire movie. And if we decide later we don’t like it, no problem. It’s just the trailer, not the actual movie.

I’m seriously geeked over seeing the trailer go public (hopefully later this week or early next week, depending on how long it takes us to work through that last step). I think it does what every trailer should do: give the audience an idea of what’s to come in terms of tone without giving away the story. I hope somebody will stumble upon it online and think “I have no idea what this is, but I want to find out.”

They’ll wait to find out, though, because, seriously, we’re not even half done with the effects yet.

Also: as you may notice from the top of the blog, we’ve been working on a new logo. Nothing fancy, which was the point – I wanted something simpler and easier to reproduce without having to rework PNGs of the original. It used the same font as we had on Friday Night Fu, mainly because that font was free, but also because I still like it all these years later. If you hate it, speak now before we do anything else with it.