JOHNSTOWN, Pa. — A Johnstown filmmaker has written his second book to help filmmakers market their work and produce movie trailers.
Johnstown native Tom Getty recently posted “How to Create Hit Movie Trailers”.
Trailers are short clips used to advertise a movie.
Getty said he has been a filmmaker since he was about 8 years old. After studying his craft in college, he wrote and directed two films – “Emulation” and “Rising Fear”, which was later retitled “America Has Fallen”.
After “America Has Fallen” was released in 2016, Getty said he began to shift gears and explore other aspects of the industry.
In 2018, he wrote his first book, titled “How to Make Hit Movies”.
“I wasn’t interested in doing another film, and I found myself increasingly interested in marketing because I felt that was so important and crucial to the success of the previous film,” Getty said.
“In this learning about marketing and stuff about movie marketing, I had the opportunity to do a movie trailer for a company called High Octane Pictures.”
Getty said he “slid into it” and found he “really had a knack” for making trailers.
He said, “I was like, ‘I really like it. There’s a lot going on. It’s like doing mini-movies, really,’ and so I really dug into how the tapes- movie ads are produced.
“They’re produced really…like movies are produced, and I really understood the mechanics and the principles, and what frustrated me was that there was no information available on how to do it. movie trailers.”
That’s what, according to Getty, inspired him to write “How to Create Hit Movie Trailers.”
“For years I wondered how movie trailers were actually made, and there are books on how to do it all,” he said.
“Making movies…communications, public speaking, but there’s never been a book on how to make movie trailers.”
He found this strange, given the prevalence of trailers in popular culture.
Getty said the book was an effort to share the information he had accumulated through his studies and work.
“I needed a system and because…when I was doing the third or fourth trailer for the movie, I started to realize that I needed a system, and what that system will be. ?” he said. “…You start with the dialogue from the movie and you don’t work from the footage, because that’s just going to confuse you.
“And so from the design of this system, which I would be doing movie trailers on, I really started to get excited about this idea of creating a training manual or a book.”
“How to Create Hit Movie Trailers” and “How to Create Hit Movies” are available on Amazon.
