In updating my website over the last month I made a somewhat depressing discovery.  It seems that the only existing trailer for my film, Living In Oblivion, is a link to a copy of a copy of an old VHS version someone had posted when the film first came out.

I spent several days contacting distributors and looking through bonus features from the previous DVD and Blu-ray releases but finally realized no original of the trailer existed. So, I imported the crappy VHS copy into my editing program and tried to sharpen it and add color-correction. It looked only slightly better. All the colors were bleeding into each other. Nothing was in focus; everything looked like it was shot through one of my grandfather's socks.

My only other option was to get a digital master of the whole film, find the shots used in the VHS and replace them all.

I didn't want to do that. It was New Year. It's an old film, I said. Let it be. Move on.

Then I looked at the murky, fuzzed out VHS trailer again. And I asked myself, "Is that really what you want people to see forever?"

So, what the hell. I took three days and recut the whole trailer from the digitized master film. I even made a few tweaks in it, adding some shots and new graphics. The difference is astounding. Everything looks beautiful and intense.

And the emotional experience was unexpectedly rewarding. Going back and forth through the whole film and seeing the amazing faces of Catherine Keener, Steve Buscemi, Dermot Mulroney, Danielle Von Zerneck, Peter Dinklage and James Legros, with such clarity was like revisiting much-loved friends.

Living In Oblivion Official HiRes Trailer.