Eight seconds in 1780s Algiers: how the Young Hamidou trailer was made

Young Hamidou is client work: an animated series in development about the boyhood of Raïs Hamidou, who sailed from Algiers in the late eighteenth century. We wrote its series bible and its first scenes; the trailer is a cut of three moments from those scenes.

A trailer has one job: make you want the show. Here is how this one was built, from the sources to the last frame.

Start from the history, not from the look

Hamidou was a real man. Albert Devoulx, who wrote his life in 1859, tells how his father apprenticed him to a tailor at ten or eleven, how the boy kept slipping away to hear the captains' tales, and how he went to sea as a ship's boy. Devoulx also describes him as a smooth talker, quick with an answer. That one line gave us the character.

For the city we read Venture de Paradis, who described Algiers in 1788: streets so narrow that three people can hardly walk side by side, flat roof terraces that touch, a harbour of quays where carpenters and sailmakers work. A boy running across the roofs and down the alleys comes straight out of those pages.

Devoulx himself warns that the childhood story may have been polished after the fact. So the series keeps two lists: what the sources say, and what we invented. The master tailor's past as a sailmaker, for instance, is ours, and it is marked as invented in every script.

Write the series before the trailer

Before any picture there was a show bible: who Hamidou is, what he wants, what stands in his way, how an episode starts and how it ends.

• The want: the sea. The prison: the cushion under the workshop window, from where he can see the sails go by.
• The flaw: he talks before he thinks, and believes he can talk his way out of anything.
• The hidden ally: the master tailor, the maâlem, who once worked on sails and never says so.
• Never on screen: captives, prizes, or violence with a blade or a gun. It is a children's show about a boy who wants to go to sea.

Cut a trailer from a show without these answers and you get a mood reel. With them, every shot is there for a reason.

Three moments, one premise

The trailer runs 8.4 seconds. It holds three moments, each fading in from black and back out, so you feel you are glimpsing three parts of a longer story.

The run. He jumps from a roof and disappears into the alleys. No words. You learn that he is quick, fearless, and somewhere he should not be.

The no. The master tailor answers from his cushion: “Hamidou the tailor sounds better.” It is his reply to the boy who dreams of being called Raïs, captain, and it holds the whole conflict of the series in five words.

The want. On a ship's deck, by the water, Hamidou says: “My legs fall asleep in there.” It echoes Devoulx, who wrote that the boy went to sea to stretch legs gone numb from the tailors' cramped way of sitting. A child hears a joke; a grown-up hears the history.

Write lines a child can say

Every line in the series uses words a child knows. The scene the maâlem's line comes from, “The Palm”, is one room, two people and one argument: Hamidou wants to sail, the maâlem wants him to sew. It turns on an object rather than a speech: a sailmaker's palm, the leather strap with a brass disk that pushes a needle through sailcloth, which the old man takes from a chest and slips on.

Each line is voiced with direction: where to pause, which word to lean on, where to sigh. That is the difference between a line being read and a boy being annoyed with his teacher.

Dress the city the way it was

Algiers in the 1780s was rich, and the series shows it. Clothes follow the period sources: embroidered vests, the fouta sash, the soft red chechia worn pulled down, babouches. Hamidou has chestnut curls, freckles and a blue embroidered vest; the maâlem wears round spectacles and a white turban over a red chechia.

The light is set once for each scene: warm sun, white walls, blue shade. That shared light is what lets three separate scenes sit side by side in one trailer.

Judge every shot in motion

A still can flatter. Before a shot goes into the cut, we watch it moving, at full size, and check three things: faces, hands and balance. A face that drifts between frames, a hand that melts into a sleeve, a body that leans as if about to fall: any one of them keeps the shot out. The trailer is short because only the seconds that pass all three checks made it in.

What a trailer like this teaches a brand film

The method is not only for series. Any brand film gets better with the same order of work:

1. Find the true story first: the archive, the founder, the customer.
2. Write down what the audience should feel before choosing a single shot.
3. Pick the few moments that carry the whole idea, and cut everything else.
4. Judge every second in motion, at full size, before it ships.

Young Hamidou is still in development. The trailer is the first look at it; see it in our work.