Mad about movies

There's the voiceover, for a start, with that voice - deep, golden, impossibly masculine and yet smooth too. There's the lush music, the slick, big-budget set pieces, the stunning special effects, all accompanied by 3-D surround sound and condensed into a thrilling three minutes that leaves you gagging for more.

Which is exactly what it's supposed to do, of course. A good trailer is a hook, designed to leave you irresistibly compelled to come back one more time.

"It's that enticing, tantalising glimpse of something that could be fantastic," says Chris Wood. "It's a teaser. People have to be sitting there at the end of the trailer and thinking, 'what happens next?'" He pauses. "A good trailer is definitely the best part of going to the cinema," he says.

Chris should know, because in his career he's made more than 400 of them. Big budget trailers, too, for films that were the movie sensations of their day: Raiders of the Lost Ark; Star Wars II, The Empire Strikes Back; most of the early Star Trek movies; Rocky II, III and IV.

So what is a man who once rubbed shoulders with the movers and shakers of the movie business doing living and working quietly in York? Running his own video production company, of course.

The 48-year-old boss of W3KTS, who lives with his wife and three children just off Gillygate, is still involved in making trailers for TV and cable films - he's made more than 3,000, in fact.

But back in the 1980s he was the man top film distributors would often call on to package and distil their big-budget blockbusters into a three-minute trailer that would guarantee a big audience.

It was a small world. Trailer-makers each had their own distinctive style: and Chris was the man distributors called on when they wanted 'wry and affectionate'.

"They'd get the Rolodex out and think, 'who do we want for this one?'" Chris says with a grin. "I did 'intellectual' as well. Other people did 'action' or 'cynical and laconic.'"

The art of a great trailer, Chris says, is to create a hunger to see a film without giving away too much.

It is not simply a resume. The idea is to tease out a film's strongest selling point and emphasise that - often with a particular audience in mind.

As trailer maker, Chris would go to a post production screening, then meet with the distributor's head of marketing to discuss the intended target audience, and what were the film's selling points. They might be a bankable star or two or, if it was by a well-known scriptwriter, a strong storyline.

Then, he'd script his own three-minute trailer and, using the precious newly-canned footage, create what would hopefully be an irresistible package.

Quite often, he admits, the trailer bore little direct resemblance to the film it was 'previewing' - often in an attempt to reach a wider audience.

He remembers once being asked to produce the trailer for a film about an ice hockey star.

"It was 123 minutes long, and 120 minutes of that was ice hockey," he says. "But our brief for making the trailer was 'don't mention ice hockey!'

"We had to discover other strands - the relationships between the star and his friends, him and his girlfriend. The fact he was an ice hockey star was incidental. It was being marketed to try to broaden out the appeal."

Another time he produced an entire three-minute trailer without once mentioning the name of the film or using a second of footage.

It consisted of a notepad, on which a hand wrote and rapidly tore off page after page. What it was writing was the script of the trailer, voiced over by an actor. It went, in those deep, gravelled, voiceover tones, something like this:

"I've been making trailers for 12 years. In all that time, I've never, ever seen a single film I've trailed. Until now.

"They made me. Positively insisted. Actually, they got quite nasty. And do you know?

"It was good. It was FANTASTIC. It's got everything. Humour. Mystery. Adventure. I wouldn't have missed it for the world."

The film? Time Bandits - the name tagged on right at the end. "They could have put any name there," Chris grins. "The trailer wasn't really about that film. It was aimed at the audience that would watch that kind of film."

Another of the films he worked on was director David Lean's epic Lawrence of Arabia. He went to a post-production screening at the Odeon, Marble Arch. It was a huge cinema, almost empty save for a select few film industry insiders.

"Two hours in somebody came in wearing a hat and sat right in front of me," Chris recalls with a grin, conjuring up that experience familiar to all of us.

Fortunately, the man in the hat didn't stay long. "The guy watching with me said he'd probably seen the film before," Chris says. "It was David Lean, come to check his film."

Despite his years in the business, Chris admits he's still in love with film. "It's the event of cinema," he says. "It's the being there, the experience, devoting yourself to being entertained. It's not the same as TV."

Among his other trailer credits, he includes Company of Wolves, Amadeus, The Elephant Man, Highlander and Gregory's Girl. He even worked on the title sequences for some of the Bond films.

But the trailer he most enjoyed working on was that to John Boorman's autobiographical 1987 film about the Blitz, Hope And Glory. Described by the Time Out film guide as a 'joy throughout', the film describes the wartime blitz through the innocent, wondering eyes of a nine-year-old boy.

"It was a gem to work on," says Chris. "A real Boy's Own adventure."

He's not got much time for the current crop of summer blockbusters. Pearl Harbor he dismisses as "a gross manipulation of film" and the rest of the summer crop - offerings like Shrek, Swordfish and Tomb Raider - as copycat or derivative.

But he admits he would have liked to make the trailer for The Dish, the recently-released Australian film about the transmitting station on an outback sheep farm that beamed live footage of Neil Armstrong's historic first steps on the moon to an enthralled world.

The trailer for the film, Chris says, was a wasted opportunity.

"The feeling of isolation, the idiosyncrasy of the location, all that should have come across stronger," he says. "That's the film's unique selling point."

Good to see that at heart, the trailer man hasn't changed his spots.