For my trailer remix project, I converted Office Space (Mike Judge 1999) into a sci-fi alien movie trailer. Chuck Klosterman’s “What’s behind Room 237” inspired me when I was deciding (last minute) what kind of genre I could turn a cult classic comedy like Office Space into. In Klosterman’s article, he talks about Immersion Criticism, which is basically trying to understand the underlying meaning of what a director is trying to say through secret clues hidden in the movie. I’ve seen Office Space at least five times. I always thought that the boss, Bill Lumbherg (Gary Cole) and many of the other employees acted like some kind of cyborg/alien/robot-from-hell entities rather than human beings. For instance, it’s unnatural how many times Lumbherg asks Peter Gibbons (Ron Livingston) if his TP reports are done. Was Judge really trying to imply that the office was crawling with anal retentive robots? Maybe not. But Klosterman supports my argument by explaining that this sort of movie viewing is “not an interpretive reading–it’s an inflexible, clandestine reality that matters way more than anything else. And it’s usually insane” (What’s Behind Room 237). After discovering what some people think The Shining is really about (Apollo 11? Seriously?), my idea seemed tame.
Office Predator? (Think alien predator, not sexual predator.)
I knew from the get go that I was already running the risk of choosing such a cult-classic comedy because it could easily look like a spoof of a sci-fi action movie rather than the real thing. I wanted for my trailer to be taken seriously, so incorporating images or videos of aliens into my trailer was out of the question. Sobchak’s main point in “Genre Film: A Classical Experience” is that all genre films draw from other films in that genre. In other words, with genre films there is not much originality, and that’s ok, because people are drawn to and connect with what’s familiar. Sobchak’s view of genre films certainly supports up my amateur trailer recut choices. Aliens, the main symbol that audiences would immediately recognize as part of a sci-fi movie was a non-option, as a mentioned previously. However, Sobchak makes an interesting point when saying “no matter how complicated the plot of a genre film may be, we always know who the good and the bad guys are; we always know whom to identify with and just for how long” (197). In Office Predators I decided to make the good guys and the bad guys as clear cut as I could so that viewers could at least identify that aspect of my trailer.
I made clear that the good guys were by literally writing “Three employees must stop the aliens” in three different screen shots. I reiterated the good guy theme by including a shot of the three employees walking together in slow motion. I also included a key scene where they all three make a pact to work together (work together to do what? that’s up to the viewer to decide). Finally, I included a scene where they’re all fighting in the car because the good guys always get in a climactic fight about something or other. Portraying who the aliens are was tricky. I used a shot panning across all the employees where they are nodding their heads or looking off into space during an office meeting. Using typography again, I flashed the word ALIENS on a black screen right before showing the employees. If that doesn’t give away who the bad guys are then i don’t know what does.
My first movie title option was ” The E.T. Department.”
It got shut down.
During this project, the all-knowing Bernard Dick was extremely helpful. The very first shot of the trailer is a high-angle shot above the cubicles showing two employees. According to Dick, a high-angle shot can make the subject look vulnerable (54 Film, Space and mise-en-scene). That is the exact reaction I want from my audience. The idea is that the aliens or some ominous creature is watching from above while these two employees work without the slightest idea that there are aliens among them, always watching. I also included a shot of the three employees right after they finished attacking the copy machine in a field. I didn’t show the copy machine, but I did include images of one employee going ballistic with a baseball bat. Let’s assume they were hashing it out with an alien, not a copier. Low-angle was used in one of these shots, which Dick says can convey dominance or power (55). In this case, I think the low-angle shot actually enhances the wild-eyed, crazed employee’s fear as he backs away from the alien. As a side-note, I have a feeling that many of my artistic visions will not be easily detected by my audience. It’s easy to make cinematographic connections when you’re the one making the trailer. Whether or not this low-angle shot will help convey that there’s something alien lurking behind the camera that is causing this employee to go nuts is questionable.
I got the idea for my last series of shots straight from Bernard Dick. I decided to use a sequence of shots to elevate the drama in the trailer. It resembles what Dick describes as
an “elliptical linear sequence” which lacks details, but assumes the audience can fill in the blanks (66). My sequence alternates images of one of the “hero” employees kicking some unknown object on the ground and images of a fire blazing the office. While in the original movie these scenes are not connected, in my trailer I’m implying that they somehow are related. The beauty about making recut trailers is that you don’t have to make a recut movie, so I will let the audience decide what plot connects this sequence.
Overall, this project was insanely frustrating but incredibly rewarding. When I finished my trailer I giddily sent it to my family and friends. They all know I am terrified of technology so I’m sure they will be impressed. I should start with the bad though, because that’s how this project started out. Both my first choice and backup movies didn’t work because the audio was out of synch. I wish I could take back the hours I spent trying to fix that. I finally chose Office Space, and everything went pretty smoothly until I started messing with the audio. For the record, I have a love/hate with Lynda videos. While helpful, they are incredible boring. I watched most of the videos on Lynda, but the audio ones were not helping me with my problem. I coudn’t get the dialogue to be loud enough so that I could be heard over my Daft Punk soundtrack. I spent a whole day just toying around with the audio only to mess everything up. I did the best I could, and you can hear the dialogue ok, but the transitions between the louder music and the softer music are terrible.
My advice to future students is to watch the Lynda videos at the beginning of your project, not when you’ve screwed something up and are trying to fix it. I would also recommend saving an updated version of your project on a flash drive. I am paranoid about losing my hard work so I saved my project to my flash drive (who’s name is Mervin) an excessive amount. Definitely pick a movie you like, but don’t love. This project will probably ruin that movie you love so much just because you will get so sick of looking at all these scenes time and time again. I’m not going to say the cliche “you should start early” because quite honestly, I didn’t start early. Everyone has their way of working, and mine just so happens to be working the Friday, Saturday and Sunday before it’s due until midnight. Last piece of advice: bring a jacket. It is sub-zero in the Communications lab.
COMM 2302 (Spring 2013) 