Anatomy of a Trailer - Fried Chicken Sandwich

Before the recipe video was published, I made a trailer for it, that is, an even shorter version of my Fried Chicken Sandwich recipe, to whet the appetite. I usually put these up on my YouTube channel, here.

My first job in the Biz, was as a videotape editor. (Way back before digital storage, most broadcast material came from physical videotape, not hard drives and tiny flash drives that are used now.) So I picked up a few tricks in my commercial and rock video editing days like speeding up the footage, or slowing it down, jump cutting or freeze framing. You'll see these tricks of the trade sprinkled throughout my 200 plus food themed videos.

The challenge in cutting a trailer is to select a couple of scenes from it and make it enticing. You have to show a shot of the finished recipe with the recipe title. The rest is the creative, eye candy, part.
 
Look at my Fried Chicken Sandwich Trailer below, and see if you notice something peculiar about it.



The trick to this trailer is that everything runs backwards. Each shot starts at the end and finishes at the beginning - does this make sense?

Just look at the sandwich shot. It starts with nothing, then pieces of sandwich assemble until you see the whole thing. What I originally did was to shoot the sandwich whole, then eat it away. That's the normal way. But to make this trailer unique, I thought it would be fun to show the action backwards.

And not only that shot, but all the other shots, too. Just notice in my opening shot how pieces of raw chicken reassemble, then the chicken bone is wrapped up by the meat, and finally the meat is swallowed up by it's skin! Kinda creepy, but cool.

I even ran the final shot of frying chicken in reverse. Plus all the audio you hear is played backwards - I learned this from listening to "backward masking" done on psychedelic records by The Beatles and Pink Floyd (and other groups from the 1960's.)

Here is the complete video of my Fried Chicken Sandwich recipe. It was shot as stop motion animation, with a few live digital video shots, below:



I hope you got something out of this blog post, a bit indulgent I know. If you liked this then click here to read about how I make an animated stop motion and time lapse title sequence.