CONTENTS Lost in a Short Forever (short film) Victoria Piasecka et al. The Lighthouse (parody trailer) Carson Creasy Ohio (short film) Kai Drees Making Marion (podcast segment) Dallas White |
Carson Creasy , The Lighthouse (parody film trailer)
Winner, 2025 Ohio State Marion Digital Media Composition Award
DESCRIPTION:
I watched The Lighthouse a few years ago with a friend of mine and I remember being deeply confused and intrigued when the film ended. To this day, I still am confused about what message that movie was trying to convey. Because of the movies seemingly sporadic plot and tendency to show the most vulgar and raw scenes, I thought it would be perfect to remix the movie’s trailer into something common, and to have less of an arthouse film vibe.
Throughout the film, I remember there being some moments between the characters that were somewhat romantic and a lot of moments that were just plain funny. With that in mind, I decided to have the trailer be an homage to a typical Hollywood slapstick romcom.
I started out by looking for music that I thought would match the tone of a light-hearted romance-comedy. Through my searching, I stumbled upon Elton John’s "Tiny Dancer," which miraculously matched the original trailer’s tempo in the exact way I was looking for. So, with my backing track chosen, I began picking apart the trailer and looking for clips. I used Davinci Resolve to edit the trailer and downloaded the audio files and videos off YouTube.
To make my trailer, I used the official A24 trailer, chopped it up and used it for the pacing in my final video using 1/3 of the original footage. I sampled 3 or 4 scenes from the movie to fill up the rest of the trailer. I used the scene where both characters dance together while completely hammered and at the end of the clip they almost kiss each other before pushing each other away. I used that clip as a tease for the trailer to hint towards the idea of the film being about the two characters as love interests for one another. The other clips I used helped to establish the story, one where Pattinson’s character “cheers to 4 weeks,” establishing the setting of the film just like in the original trailer. I also included Dafoe’s character’s “you don’t like me cooking” scene as I think out of context is a funny moment.
For me these clips are the sticking points of the trailer and coupled with the song "Tiny Dancer," I think it does a decent job at establishing a romcom feel. Rhetorically speaking, I’m sure The Lighthouse has a lot to offer, but I like to think it was just an insanely unhinged film with no deeper meaning. Annd I will admit, I haven’t seen it in a long time so I could be completely wrong in that assessment, but I still believe making the movie trailer disguise the movie as something funny is representative of a lot of moments in the film that made it worth watching.
