Daniel Warner 9/24/20 Daniel Warner 9/24/20

Screen Queensland 2020 (Trailer)

Production Company: Stranger Films

Producer: Genevieve Larin, Tony Walsh

Client: Screen Queensland

Edit: Daniel Warner

Daniel Warner 9/24/20 Daniel Warner 9/24/20

RISE (Trailer)

Production Company: Vision Pictures

Producer: Mack Lindon, Maya Weidner

Co Edit: Jack Higgins, Daniel Warner

Daniel Warner 5/29/19 Daniel Warner 5/29/19

Martha The Monster (Trailer)

It all begins with an idea.

Production Company: See Pictures

Producer: Michael Pontin, Peter Slee

Client: See Pictures

Edit: Daniel Warner

Daniel Warner 5/29/19 Daniel Warner 5/29/19

Otherlife (Trailer)

It all begins with an idea.

Production Company: See Pictures

Producer: Michael Pontin, Peter Slee

Client: See Pictures

Edit: Daniel Warner

Editing the OtherLife trailer back in 2016 was an absolute pleasure. I was connected to the job by a friend who knew the producer and felt very fortunate that the production would task me with the job of creating their trailer. At that time I had edited some EPK material for the production company and felt I had a good understanding of what they were looking for. After a trip to Sydney to pick up a HDD and meet the producers I was soon back in my Brisbane edit suite ready to watch the film for the first time.

I was blown away. The film was, and still is, a fantastic piece of Australia cinema. You’ll have to go watch it on Netflix to find out for yourself but let me say I was captivated from start to finish.

There are no right or wrong ways to start a trailer edit and often experimenting with ideas creates the most creative outcomes. I, nor the producers, wanted this to be a standard Hollywood trailer that gave away all of the plot in 90 seconds. The story must be teased, anticipation built, and the edit must reflect the confusing world of the films subject, the Otherlife drug. The tricky part was balancing the family love story critical to Ren’s motivation and the cool sci fi world of the drug.

The general structure came together quite quickly but the refining process, as always, took a while. We spent a while on the opening sequence and playing around with different quotes to bring the viewer into the story. At one point we had opened on the hospital brother scene playing out at length in an attempt to build Ren’s motivation, but this ended up being less exciting, less sci-fi and overall not reflective of the majority of the film. So we ended up going with drug demonstration opening as seen in the trailer.

Much of the trailer focuses on the first act, to avoid spoilers, and then acts to tease us just enough to be left with more questions than answers.

Unfortunately the project file has been lost to a corrupted hard drive (before I had redundancies in place… Let that be a lesson) so I cannot show you the timeline. I will update this if I find the original project files in my archives.

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Whilst putting together this blog I had a little google search about the trailer, and after getting through all the troll posts I saw this lovely post by Kelley Eskridge, one of the script writers of the film:

There’s something about having the trailer that makes the film feel that last bit of really-for-realz to me. I’m so pleased and proud. Isn’t it cool?
There is a story to tell around this: there have been bogus OtherLife trailers bobbing about on YouTube for months, garnering hundreds of thousands of views. For the most part, these so-called trailers were badly edited, narratively random, and intended only to pull hits and lure people to torrented versions of various pirated films. Seriously, I have never seen a worse “movie trailer” in my life than the mess I saw back in the fall carrying the title “official OtherLife Netflix trailer.” The majority of comments left by well-intentioned viewers who thought they were seeing a real trailer were some version of This is stoopid, I would never watch this film! It made me fucking nuts.
Well, here is the official trailer at last and it is not stoopid. It is smart and beautiful, and I’m delighted to have it.

I rarely get to see public opinion about my work so this warms my heart to see.

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Looking back at this trailer in 2020 I can see many things I would do differently. Hindsight is 20/20, and often timeframe and budgets cloud creative intent, so whilst I am proud to have worked on this trailer I know I can do better if given a do-over.

Dan.