I didn't see anyone talking about this trailer, so I wanted to give my thoughts on it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhGP5Oww-YM
I'm not a huge fan of Teen Titans but I did watch a fair bit of both the original TV show and Teen Titans GO! I was able to appreciate both of them for what they were, even if one of them clearly had more time and effort put into it. I came into this trailer as a fairly casual fan of the property and I can honestly say that I cannot wait for this show to come out! This show looks so inconceivably awful and corporate that I'm shocked that there were actual creative directors behind it. Let me address my complaints:
1. Music: I'm not sure if the track they played will be in the show, but its inclusion into the trailer does not make the show look good. The producers of the show picked a 2000's track that was put into every edgy TV show that was marketed towards teens in 2009. I thought that this trend ended several years ago, but I guess I was wrong. It doesn't fit with the footage being presented to us and feels like a lazy inclusion by some out of touch 50 year old that didn't know how to write a compelling narrative that teenagers could relate to and just substituted bad music to make up for it.
2. Lighting/Color Grading: This show looks so goddamn ugly. Every shot of the show that takes place during the day has this ugly gray tint to it that washes out all the colors. It's not particularly well shot either and doesn't make use of shadows or depth of field or any other cinematography tricks, so it just ends up looking boring. My guess is that they shot the show on digital cameras (which artificially wash out the footage) and forgot to color grade the day sequences and just edited raw footage. The night sequences look they've been digitally altered with in order to make the footage appear darker then it actually is. There are sources of light in every night shot and they appear to have been weakened in some way to make the show look visually darker than it is. The lighting in the night sequences might be up to preference, but it looks incredibly ugly to look at it and just looks like an excuse to hide poorly choregraphed fight scenes.
3. Dialogue: It uses every cliché and generic lines of dialogue that you could possibly imagine. If it's not that, then the lines either just plain suck or are delivered in the worst way possible.
- "You don't know what I've become."
- "My mom says there's no such thing as monsters. I used to believe that. I was wrong."
- "There's something evil inside of me."
- "Sometimes when I feel the darkness, it feels good."
- "F*ck Batman!"
I feel like a lot of these lines are going to become memes in the future, if they haven't already. It's the most lazy and predictable writing that the could have possibly come up with and it feels like they lifted it from shows from 2005. I feel the writing in the show will be much worse if this is the best they could show off.
4. Costume Design: This costumes all look hideous. Robin's is okay for the most part, but the rest of the designs are just awful. Starfire has this ugly $5 dollar wig along with this cheap dress that they forced the actress to wear. She has no resemblance to the character from the comics or the TV show and just has an unappealing design that doesn't look like a costume that an alien from outer space would wear. For Beast Boy, instead of using makeup to make the character look green, I think the production team just used CGI to make his skin look green. That shot of him jumping might be the absolute worst shot in this entire trailer. I like the actual clothes he's wearing since I feel like that's something Beast Boy would wear, but I'm baffled as to why the production team screwed up all the technical details. Raven has the design of an edgy, emo teenager that didn't even seem cool in 2006. I'm not sure of the direction they wanted to go with this character, but her design is not distinctive or unique in the slightest. Hawk and Dove are hidden behind the show's terrible lighting so I can't accurately judge. Ultimately, it looks they only had $12 to spend on the costumes.
5. Sound Design: All of the sound effects sound like they're lifted from stock websites. They used a neck snap sound for when Robin steps on some guy's jaw and it's so jarringly out of place. That shot where Dove slices some dude's leg is way too loud and impactful for the action being portrayed on the screen. The sound effect that plays when Robin hits a dude with his staff isn't properly synced up with the action and sounds too loud. The machine gun sounds like it's having little effect on the environment. The editors don't even make an attempt to make the sound effects sound less stock. I genuinely want to see how they combine dialogue and music and handle the 2 together.
6. CGI: It looks bad. I don't even know what to say about his. The shot of Starfire shooting fire looks worse than the CGI they used in Suicide Squad. Any shots of Raven doing anything look uninspired and are accompanied with Movie Maker level editing and effects. That's pretty much all they showed for CGI, but it looked so bad that I had to comment on it.
I'm really excited for this show to come out to see how incompetent it ends up being. Hopefully it can retain the cringe factor from the trailer and not just be boring garbage.
