Created for an avant-garde film class, this is a teaser produced by FilmsRoyale. The group's earlier film, The Long Road to Gary, was all about the shooting of a fake horror film. Fritz, Francis & Frederick is similar: it's a "paranoid odyssey of adolescent change" in which the three heroes attempt to shoot their first feature film. This teaser takes this motif one step further: it's not about people making movies, it's about movies themselves.

The video is all style, in which the editing is both a means and an end. This sort of thing dates back at least to the garish advertising campaign for Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange. More recently, the trailers for Roger Avary's The Rules of Attraction (not to mention the film itself) called attention to the moviemaking with split screens, reverse shots and freeze frames. The key thing here is entertainment value, and happily enough the teaser for Fritz, Francis & Frederick has that in spades.

This teaser is all about repetition. We see a character bite into a sandwich not once, not twice, not thrice, but four times. The screen is split into boxes that reduce in number each time a shot repeats. The reference point is somewhere between a Brian De Palma thriller and an Austin Powers gag. What makes it all click is the track "The Vision of Lighting" by FLEX. The images and music have a nice energy and really sync up in a cool way.

Most teasers don't have much ambition beyond getting you interested in the movie. It's rare to find one that's willing to take risks and try new things. This video works as both a successful experiment and a successful tease.