Film Trailers

A film trailer is created alongside a film to advertise a film and informs the audience about it to make them want to watch it themselves, which generates money for the production company, allowing them to make more films. Without a film trailer, the film may reach a more more limited audience, resulting in a reduced profit for the production company.
Wikipedia defines a film trailer as

"A trailer or preview is an advertisement or a commercial for a feature film that will be exhibited in the future at a cinema."

Film trailers:

•  normally between 30 seconds long and 3 minutes long; a shorter trailer is called a teaser trailer or promo and a longer trailer is called a full length trailer.
• they include clips from the film to give a rough idea of what the film will be like.
• Most have more than one trailer
• if there is more than one potential audience different trailers will be used to aim at different audiences.
• May also include clips that do not make it into the final edit of the film

A typical teaser trailer looks like this. This is for The Hunger Games (2012, dir. Gary Ross)

And this a full length trailer of the same film is seen here which 2:29mins long



Trailers can be seen

• on TV in advert breaks,
• the cinema before a film,
• film websites such as IMDB
• anywhere in which a film is being promoted, such as film festivals.
• data streaming sites such as iTunes or Amazon where the film may be bought. 
• Film magazines may also mention a trailer, obviously it cannot be shown. However, they may feature the trailer on their websites.

As trailers are primarily aimed at the potential audience of a film to draw them in. They are distributed to the audience in appropriate ways; for example, if a film is aimed at teenagers, the trailer will most probably be shown at showings of similar films and on the advert breaks of TV programmes on a teenage based channel such as E4.
Trailers are released up to the release of a film, this generates a hype around the film to get people excited for it and therefore want to watch it. Usually a teaser trailer is released first with other full length trailers released after it closer to the release of a film. Trailers stop being released around a month before a film is released into cinemas as it builds excitement for the actual film.


wikipedia definition found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trailer_(promotion)