Imaginary Worlds - The Booj

Episode Date: August 21, 2019

Movie trailers have come a long way from the voice-of-God narrators in the ‘80s and ‘90s. So why do the big budget sci-fi fantasy trailers still all feel the same? This week, we're featuring a fun episode from the podcast Twenty Thousand Hertz, where their host Dallas Taylor talks with James Deaville about the history of trailers. Plus, YouTuber Craven Moorhaus breaks down the elements of blockbuster trailers to the point where you’ll never watch trailers the same way again. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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I often get requests from listeners for episode ideas, and one of the most common ones is to do an episode about movie trailers. But I keep thinking, I don't know how I could do a better episode than what my friends over at the podcast 20,000 Hertz did with their episode, which was called The Bouge. 20,000 Hertz explores the backstory behind these sounds that we hear throughout media, sounds we often take for granted, even when they're having a profound effect on how we experience a TV show, movie, video game, or even an electronic gadget. But the reason why I love this episode is because it puts to words a feeling that I've often had about movie trailers. They all feel the same, which is weird because there isn't a narrator anymore saying,

in a world where, you know, whatever. And yet there's something very predictable about them, especially the big budget sci-fi fantasy franchise trailers. And after hearing this episode, I have never been able to watch those trailers the same way again. And I love movie trailers. I mean, when one of them is trending on Twitter, I watch it immediately. And when they all come out at Comic-Con,

it's like somebody on Twitter said, it's nerd Christmas. So without further ado, here is the episode titled The Bouge, a term that will mean a lot to you by the time you finish this episode, from the show 20,000 Hertz and their host, Dallas Taylor. When you think about how a movie trailer sounds, what comes to mind? Does it sound something like this? In a land of eternal beauty and infinite mystery, a legend was born. This is the trailer from the 2000 film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. In it, you have all of the ingredients of a classic trailer.

The story of a warrior. Including the legendary voice of Don LaFontaine. Crouching tiger, hidden dragon. The only thing that could possibly take this trailer over the top is the classic intro, In a World. In a world without gas. In a world that's powered by violence. In a world of falafel. This is the classic recipe for a movie trailer, right? Well, not really. Movie trailers don't really sound like that anymore. A boomy voice of God is pretty rare nowadays.

Trailers now really sound a lot more like this. And you've got this sound that can only be described as the bouge. You know, the bouge. You usually hear it before or after the more obvious blah. And after listening to this episode, you'll start hearing the boosh everywhere. The boosh is a term that I think we just made it up. It's the term that we use for the subwoofer shaking low frequency drops that usually happen at about the peak of some catastrophic event in a trailer. That's Craven Morehouse, co-creator of The Arlenauts.

It's a YouTube channel that uses sound to make fun of and recontextualize films and trailers. We like to make sound a little more transparent to the point of creating something comical, but also to highlight how important sound can actually be. The bouge can also be called a bass drop or a sub drop. Today, you can count on the bouge occurring in just about every suspenseful action movie trailer. I'm going in. She never perished! To us in the trailer, that's when you're seeing the biggest thing happen.

This would be a planet exploding or a building collapsing. So why do so many trailers use the bouge and other super aggressive sound effects? You have to consider that trailers are a form of advertising. That's James DeVille, a music professor at Carleton University. His project is called Trailerality, and it studies the effects of music and sound in movie trailers. As a form of advertising, they're convincing people of going to movies. Sometimes they're good, sometimes they're not so good, though. And people should be aware of the power of music and sound in trying to persuade them. The movie industry brings in around $40 billion a year.

And that's in the U.S. alone. It's a giant, highly competitive business. Every second of sound and music is maxed out to keep your attention. maxed out to keep your attention. To really prove how much sound can change the tone of a movie trailer, you don't have to go very far. Simply searching for a recut trailer on YouTube brings up a ton of amazing fan-made trailers. Some of these are serious, but tons are taking a film in one genre and making it seem like it came out of another. Take, for example, this Elf trailer, where it's turned into a thriller. in one genre and making it seem like it came out of another. Take, for example, this Elf trailer, where it's turned into a thriller.

All right, let's get it over with. I'm Buddy the Elf. And here's a trailer for Dumb and Dumber, but with the score from the Inception trailer. I'm talking about a little place called Aspen. Inception trailer. On the other end of the spectrum, here's a trailer that perfectly parodies 90s family drama trailers, but it's for The Shining. Meet Jack Torrance. I'm outlining a new writing project. He's a writer looking for inspiration. Lots of ideas. No good ones. Meet Danny. He's a kid looking for a dad. There's hardly anybody to play with around here.

What's up, Doc? These parodies prove just how critical sound is in a trailer. However, trailers obviously didn't always sound like this. So let's rewind and go on a journey from the very first trailers to the ones we know today. The very first trailer in a movie theater came in 1913 in New York City. Interestingly, this trailer wasn't even for a movie. It was for a Broadway musical called The Pleasure Seekers. But this idea of creating a trailer quickly swept the movie industry. Soon, theater projectionists everywhere were adding them to the end of their film reels, hence the word trailers. They were traditionally at the end of the main feature. Early on, before sound could be married to picture, trailers were

accompanied by music, with big lines of text appearing on screen between key scenes. These giant lines of text were the early form of a narrator. It gave all of the necessary plot points. Of course, this was mainly because films didn't have dialogue yet. But even after dialogue came to films, trailers kind of remained the same. That was because, basically, only one company was making all of the trailers. only one company was making all of the trailers. In the 1920s, even before sound, there was one company that managed to gain a monopoly by signing various studios to create trailers,

the National Screen Services, NSS. So by the time sound comes, they're creating most of the trailers. With the addition of sound and films, the NSS added an iconic element to trailers, voiceover narration. Casablanca, city of hope and despair, located in French Morocco in North Africa. The meeting place of adventurers, fugitives, criminals, refugees, lured into this danger-swept oasis by the hope of escape to the Americas.

But the NSS was formulaic. The narration, music, and titles all looked and sounded the same. There was a fairly strong uniformity across the boards, and the kind of music that they would use starting in the 30s then tended to be very dramatic. But these were also tracks that would wander from one trailer to another. Everything changed when the NSS lost its monopoly. This was around the mid-50s when boutique trailer houses started popping up. This new competition pushed trailer editors to get more creative. Pardon me, sir, but what are you looking at? Is that by any chance the picture called the Pink Panther? They would contract out sound and music from independent producers of music. The trailer house then would license the music they independent producers of music.

The trailer house then would license the music they need for the trailer. They would produce the trailer and then send it to the studio. Fast forward to the 80s, 90s and in the 2000s. Hal Douglas and Don LaFontaine. I'm sure you'll remember these voices. This is Hal Douglas. Men in black, protecting the earth from the scum of the universe. And this is Don LaFontaine. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Terminator 2, Judgment Day. This time, he's back. For good. These two voices dominated trailers for decades. But from the year 2000 to 2010, these voice-of-God type of narrators pretty much disappeared. The movie industry had used this formula for so long. It was becoming so obviously cliche to both the public and the film industry.

It was Jerry Seinfeld that might have been the one to finally kill off the classic movie trailer voice. The trailer for his 2002 film Comedian basically made fun of the entire trailer industry. It starred none other than Hal Douglas, poking fun at himself. In a world where laughter was king. No, in a world, Jack. What do you mean, no, in a world?

It's not that kind of movie. Oh, okay. In a land that... No, in a land either. In a time... No, I don't think so. In a land before time... It in a land either. In a time... No, I don't think so. In a land before time... It's about a comedian, Jack.

The other thing that killed narration in trailers was the internet. Before YouTube, people only really saw trailers at the movies. They only had one shot. The narration helped audiences get the story in a single viewing. Today, we tend to watch trailers multiple times. There's a lot less need for narration. So now, because of all this, the sound effects and music started to take a more prominent place in trailers. For example, that iconic bwa noise you've heard in every It has a ton of variations. Pair these epic effects with the cover of a well-known song, and you've got yourself some movie trailer magic.

To get people on board with this trailer, we're going to recontextualize something to get you excited. So oftentimes people will do orchestral or symphonically, you know, trailerized versions of a popular song and usually an unexpected song. The cover song trope started becoming popular around 2010.

Here's a Belgian girls' choir cover of Radiohead's Creep for the Social Network. Don't care if it hurts I wanna have control I want a perfect body That was perhaps the cover song that really started that revolution.

This trailer was so popular that producers hired the same choir to do covers for many other trailers. Here they are covering Metallica's Nothing Else Matters that was featured in the Zero Dark Thirty trailer. And here's Gang of Youth covering David Bowie's Heroes in the Justice League trailer. And here's Destiny's Child Survivor in the Tomb Raider trailer. Now, when I hear it, I think, not again. in. These movie trailer cliches are so common that it's

easy to parody. And it's not just the booge or the bwa or the cover song, but it goes even deeper. I think what happened was we just started noticing certain tropes that were used so ubiquitously that it was becoming funny to us.

Trailers have become so formulaic that Craven and his Arlenauts partner, Zach Kuntz, decided to pack them all into one glorious mega parody trailer. Dallas Taylor will deconstruct that fake trailer in just a moment. Okay, let's get back to Dallas Taylor, the host of 20,000 Hertz. We're in an age of the biggest and boomiest trailers ever. These trailers sometimes try so hard to be so epic that they border on self-parody. Craven Morehouse and Zach Kuntz make silly videos using sound for their YouTube channel. They're collectively known as the Arlenauts.

In some ways, we're trying to make a commentary that does have some comedic value, but also gets people possibly interested in what the function of sound is. In the 80s and 90s, trailers were dominated by deep, gravelly-voiced narrators. Now, we're in a sea of bois and bouges. We just were thinking that people were leaning on that sound effect just too hard. But there is no denying how cool it can be when it happens. You know, you feel it in your core. Our brains are wired to have a survival response to strong, low frequencies. Low frequency sounds trigger fear responses like rumbling thunder or a lion roar. But how exactly is this sound made? The fundamental of most bouges are made by some sort of basic wave,

a common choice being a sine wave, which has no harmonics. Then you give it a nice smooth pitch down. But you could also use a square wave, a sawtooth wave, or a triangle wave. But that's just the bones of bouge creation. Sound designers can make them a bit punchier by adding a kick, a bit more aggressive by adding distortion,

or you could add a chorus or double it. The bouge possibilities are seemingly endless. The booge possibilities are seemingly endless. Craven and Zach made a YouTube video called How to Make a Blockbuster Movie Trailer. In it, they explore all of the tropes you tend to see in a modern trailer. Of course, we have the booge, but as they dove deeper into these sonic tropes, they discovered more and more. So right out of the gate, we start with the single note trope. Which feels like a good way to get the viewer on board with something that is possibly foreign to them.

So right at eight seconds, we introduce another sound effect beyond the single note, which is the low bwa. Usually the low bwa is sort of the call and response to the single note trope. Dialogue has its tropes too. So the thing that we're trying to juggle here, obviously, with adding dialogue, is to give the viewer the impression that this template crosses many levels. Have you ever wondered about this particular thing?

levels. Have you ever wondered about this particular thing? Because it turns out that that thing is real. At about this point in the trailer, oftentimes the music that has been following, you know, the action thus far in the trailer then blossoms into what is a recognizable cover of a song that typically has not been covered before. We landed on You Spin Me Around because that song is so hyper ridiculous and awesome. The idea that it would be used as the most dramatic song for a trailer was about as abstractly ridiculous as we could get. It just immediately felt perfectly stupid. You get people hooked, and then you do some sort of tonal shift that introduces a problem or a bad guy or some sort of conflict.

You didn't think it would be that easy, did you? When you have a rhythm, a pulse going, and then it's da-da-da-da-da, the triplet can be really effective, but for some reason in trailers, that's the hottest thing ever, is a triplet locked to, like, visuals, snapping in at the same moment. The climax of the trailer is punctuated by not one, but two bouges. I don't think I'm the one. I'm not the person who can stop this thing. You are that person.

Now take my hand! Run! It's like, why a second bouge? Like, that's as ridiculous as it can get. After the double bouge rise, it's time to start bringing this trailer home. So of course everything has to build to a head. The music will pause, breathe for a minute, and usually within that breath, sonically,

there's a character bite. For every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction. We went with the secondary statement from a bad guy. I am the reaction. And then give you that last single note, smash in the face, for the title reveal. One final iteration of the chorus, which even feels more stupid. While trailers are boomier than ever before, this certainly isn't the first time that they've all sounded the same. The 30s had many of the same overly dramatic music tracks.

The 80s and 90s were dominated by two deep, aggressive voices. Today's trailers have the bois and the bouge. With that in mind, what will future trailers sound like? I'd like to see more original music and music that doesn't sound like it's taken off of the shelf and reused. Usually what happens is somebody does something way outside the box, and then people latch onto it, and then it just becomes the new off of the shelf and reuse. Usually what happens is somebody does something way outside the box, and then people latch onto it, and then it just becomes the new thing that people are doing. I can almost imagine some movie trailer producers

watching that video and saying, okay, these guys just blew it for the next six months for us. And now, here's how to make a blockbuster movie trailer by Oral Knots in its entirety. Have you ever wondered about this particular thing? Because it turns out that that thing is real. You spin me right round, baby, right round Like a record, baby, right round, round, round That thing I referred to earlier? Well, it's happening, and it will destroy us all. You spin me right round, baby, right round

Someone has to stop this thing. Like a record, baby, right around Someone has to stop this thing! Like a record baby, right around And that someone is you! You didn't think it would be that easy, did you? Like a record baby, right around Like a record baby, right around I don't think I'm the one. I'm not the person who can stop this thing. You are that person. Now take my hand!

Run! who can stop this thing. You are that person. Now take my hand! Run! For every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction. I am the reaction. That is it for this week. Thank you for listening. You can find out more about 20,000 Hertz at their site, 20k.org. And if Dallas's voice sounds familiar, it may be because we did a crossover episode last year called Theater of the

Mind, which you can find in the Imaginary Worlds podcast feed. My assistant producer is Stephaniehanie billman you can like the show on facebook i tweet at emalinski and imagine worlds pod and the show's website