Inside the strange, enthu­si­as­tic world of YouTube’s fake trail­er community

At some point or anoth­er, while scrolling through YouTube, it’s like­ly you’ll come across a new trail­er for an upcom­ing film that you’re des­per­ate to watch. Backed by a bona fide ban­ner, a ver­i­fied account han­dle and mil­lions of views, you ham­mer the touch­pad. You watch it. And, well, if the cre­ator has done a good job, that’s all, folks.

Truth is: you’ve been flickrolled.

See, the trail­er was total­ly fake. Per­haps, if you have an eye for the ersatz, keep tabs on the film release cal­en­dar or just scroll down to the com­ments, then you’ll have realised that it was all just one big tease – a fake, fan-made trail­er. The cul­prits? The con­cept trail­er com­mu­ni­ty – a coterie of cre­atives mak­ing unof­fi­cial trail­ers for upcom­ing (or even non-exis­tent) films and post­ing them online for every­one to see and, per­haps some­times, believe.

Pret­ty much every major com­mer­cial film now gets the trick­ster trail­er treat­ment. YouTube is stuffed with them; right now, there are scores of super­hero sequel teasers (with a par­tic­u­lar focus on the tan­gled web of Spi­der-Man spin-offs) plus a load of Net­flix pro­to­types (includ­ing a fresh­ly-inked Squid Game 2). Sure, you’re less like­ly to find the new A24 mapped out – but it’s play­ing to a crowd of video game, ani­ma­tion and action fanat­ics, mar­vel­ling at imag­ined plot twists. They’re also gen­uine­ly well-made.

It all began ten years ago with Smash­er, a YouTube chan­nel start­ed by free­lance video edi­tor Rob Long. ​“I’ve always had an affin­i­ty for mod­ern trail­ers, so the abil­i­ty to then cre­ate my own and watch peo­ple react to some­thing I made will always be an amaz­ing feel­ing,” he explains. While Long is wary of those jump­ing on the con­cept trail­er band­wag­on for the wrong rea­sons and those rush­ing out ideas, he recog­nis­es there’s a lot of tal­ent out there.

For a long time, Long was pret­ty much by him­self; soon, though, suc­ces­sors assem­bled, includ­ing Teas­er PRO. Start­ed by friends Vladimir and Ivan, it began due to the friends’ shared love of movie trail­ers while grow­ing up. Recount­ing a sto­ry wor­thy of a big-screen Bil­dungsro­man, Vladimir remem­bers mak­ing films on the video edi­tor of his first phone – a Nokia 5228 – cre­at­ing trail­er-like mon­tages to enter­tain his friends, before get­ting his first com­put­er. Inspired by a GTA 6 par­o­dy, the duo went into production.

Take one? A trashy trail­er for The Force Awak­ens. ​“We cre­at­ed a mask for the main vil­lain, made a cos­tume, and start­ed shoot­ing. How­ev­er, when we start­ed edit­ing, we realised that what we had filmed was ter­ri­ble and didn’t look seri­ous at all,” he said. Instead, they decid­ed to splice togeth­er exist­ing clips from movies set in space, backed by research of past comics and the­o­ry videos – their subs sky­rock­et­ed. After that fol­lowed a ver­sion of Marvel’s Avengers: Infin­i­ty War – to date it’s clocked up 19 mil­lion views.

Now, some plat­forms are using the con­cept trail­er as a con­tent stream rather than their soul out­put. ​“I began exper­i­ment­ing with the actu­al con­cept trail­er aspect around Decem­ber of 2020,” says Con­nor, own­er of the pop cul­ture plat­form SLU­URP. Start­ing by stitch­ing togeth­er a Lilo and Stitch con­cept trail­er that was well-received, Con­nor con­tin­ued with a focus on video game movies. ​“It’s def­i­nite­ly become more com­pet­i­tive since I first dipped my toes into this world; every day it seems a new con­cept trail­er chan­nel emerges,” he says.

So how do you make a block­buster fake trail­er? ​“We brain­storm the plot for the future film based on what has already hap­pened in the pre­vi­ous instal­ment and try to come up with a log­i­cal and orig­i­nal con­tin­u­a­tion of the sto­ry,” Vladimir says. Then, you’ve got to source your mate­r­i­al. ​“We study the cast of the future film (if avail­able), review their fil­mo­gra­phies, and com­pile a list of movies or TV shows where suit­able footage or lines may be found,” he continues.

For Con­nor, it’s para­mount to choose scenes that aren’t par­tic­u­lar­ly well known, explain­ing he didn’t pick the icon­ic Buzz and Woody fly­ing moment for his Toy Sto­ry 5 trail­er. ​“In the trail­ers I per­son­al­ly edit, I have a pref­er­ence against using high­ly rec­og­niz­able scenes or sequences from oth­er films…my goal is always to immerse the audi­ence, mak­ing them feel like they’re watch­ing a teas­er for an entire­ly new film,” he says.

Then it’s time to edit. ​“We need to con­nect hun­dreds of unre­lat­ed clips from dif­fer­ent movies and give them an entire­ly new mean­ing, mak­ing the video look con­cise and feel like a coher­ent work that reflects our orig­i­nal idea of what the movie might look like,” Vlad­mir says, explain­ing that they use colour cor­rec­tion and mask­ing to cut out char­ac­ters, extract lines from oth­er movies to cre­ate new dia­logues and ensure that the music syncs up.

As expect­ed, there’s a lot of sit­ting in your abode, alone, on Adobe. ​“I basi­cal­ly sit at my desk and replay the same two sec­onds of my edit­ing time­line over and over again until I think it looks and sounds right,” Long says.

The advent of AI is play­ing a role in this process. While both the Writ­ers Guild of Amer­i­ca strike, which has just end­ed, and the SAG-AFTRA strike, which has just begun, have been used to express con­cerns sur­round­ing AI, fake trail­er cre­ators are exper­i­ment­ing with its end­less pos­si­bil­i­ties. Long, for exam­ple, is using it to cre­ate thumbs-uppable thumb­nails and Vladimir is util­is­ing it to enhance video qual­i­ty up to 4K, while Con­nor is using AI to speed up the edit­ing process. ​“It allows for intri­cate audio iso­la­tion and char­ac­ter extrac­tion, which has been a game-chang­er,” he says.

Does it threat­en their own art form? ​“I can’t say how things will be down the line, maybe peo­ple will be able to just auto-gen­er­ate trail­ers entire­ly?” Long ques­tions. ​“Giv­en the rapid advance­ments, I wouldn’t be sur­prised if the near future sees us tran­si­tion from con­cept trail­ers to full-blown con­cept films!” Con­nor says. Already, AI is allow­ing cre­ators to make trail­ers for movies that aren’t even based on any sort of exist­ing fran­chise, as with Gen­e­sis, a fake film teas­er that caused a stir in the sum­mer cre­at­ed by a prod­uct design­er on his lap­top. ​“We’ve noticed that some less con­sci­en­tious cre­ators, who don’t put much effort into their work, were among the first to adopt such ser­vices because they allow for the rapid cre­ation of numer­ous sim­i­lar videos,” Vladimir says war­i­ly. ​“I believe that AI is an excel­lent tool that enables incred­i­ble things in just a mat­ter of sec­onds, but it all depends on how and for what pur­pos­es it is used.”

This arti­fice of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, along with the com­mu­ni­ty learn­ing on the job, means that these con­cept trail­ers are get­ting more con­vinc­ing. Do the cre­ators actu­al­ly want to fool peo­ple? ​“In the ear­ly days, I was admit­ted­ly irri­tat­ed when peo­ple would com­ment ​“FAKE!” I would gen­uine­ly put a lot of effort into cre­at­ing these con­cepts. But it doesn’t both­er me any­more,” says Con­nor, who is clear that he’s not aim­ing to punk viewers.

“Some cre­ators in our niche label their videos as ​‘Offi­cial Trail­er’ or omit the word ​‘Con­cept’, which I find can be mis­lead­ing. It’s easy to see why view­ers might feel deceived,” he con­tin­ues. Vladimir and Long agree, empha­sis­ing the impor­tance of mak­ing it clear that it’s not the real thing; though many peo­ple still don’t notice. They also all note that, because of the need to use exist­ing clips through YouTube’s fair use pol­i­cy, it’s hard to make a profit.

Most of these cre­ators, though, aren’t star­ing wide-eyed at their screen into the wee hours to make big bucks; instead, it’s for the love of it all. In return, eager-eyed view­ers get to enjoy one pos­si­ble uni­verse in their mul­ti­verse. ​“The feed­back I cher­ish most is when view­ers com­ment that they gen­uine­ly believed they were watch­ing the real trail­er, or they express hope that the offi­cial film fol­lows the nar­ra­tive we’ve craft­ed,” Con­nor says. ​“It’s an indi­ca­tor that we’ve hit the mark. At the heart of it, our trail­ers give fans a fun glimpse into what could be,” he continues.

Long is sim­i­lar­ly moved. ​“There are reac­tions to my videos on YouTube where view­ers have actu­al­ly open­ly cried, jumped up out of their seats from excite­ment or just been left with a calm sense of appre­ci­a­tion. Every reac­tion means so much to me,” he says.

Could it be, per­haps, that along­side the many view­ers indulging in fan­ta­sy, real-life movie pro­duc­ers are tak­ing notes? Are these trail­ers a form of tri­al-and-error for pos­si­ble plots? ​“There have been instances where offi­cial trail­ers dropped, and I couldn’t help but side-eye! At times there have been strik­ing sim­i­lar­i­ties to our con­cept trail­ers from months or even years pri­or,” Con­nor laughs.

“Some­times, the resem­blance is uncan­ny enough to make me think that per­haps the offi­cial edi­tor took a peek at our work. Now, if the next Juras­sic World movie has ​‘Extinc­tion’ in the title, I’m def­i­nite­ly stak­ing a claim on that inspi­ra­tion!” he con­tin­ues. Long, mean­while, thinks that his viral Friends: The Movie trail­er, which gained 100 mil­lion views and world­wide media atten­tion in 2018, may have sparked the reunion event; Vladimir sim­i­lar­ly claims his viral I Am Leg­end 2 trail­er catal­ysed Warn­er Bros to com­mis­sion the sequel.

Either way, the con­cept trail­er com­mu­ni­ty has made its mark on the movies. While more pre­ten­tious cinephiles may see them as a sort of cheap mag­ic trick, these phoney trail­ers are far from phoned in. Look­ing back on it all, in his own sepia-tinged flash­back, Vladimir remem­bers Teas­er PRO’s orig­i­nal aim: two film-obsessed kids look­ing to impress their friends and enter the world of enter­tain­ment. It’s clear his fan­ta­sy has become reality.

“When we start­ed tak­ing this seri­ous­ly, our dream was to even­tu­al­ly cre­ate real movie trail­ers and take orders from stu­dios,” he says. ​“I think that by mak­ing our trail­ers, we want­ed to touch the world of cin­e­ma, even if only a lit­tle bit.”