Wiz Khalifa "Weed Farm"

The official trailer for Wiz Khalifa's Weed Farm, directed by Rick Wayne.

A launch trailer is a specific assignment with a specific failure mode. It has to explain a thing nobody has seen, in under a minute, to an audience that arrived for the name attached rather than for the product. The name does the recruiting. The trailer has to do the converting, and it has to do it without the running room a campaign would give it.

Wayne's answer to that kind of problem is consistently structural rather than decorative. He has described the brief as a starting point and the why as the film, and said the question he wants answered before anything else is what is at stake for the person watching and what they should feel, learn, or do. On a launch piece that reframing is the whole job. The temptation is to make a highlight reel of features. The better film picks one promise and spends fifty four seconds making it feel real.

It is also talent-led work, and Wayne has made a number of films in that mode across his career, from this trailer through the Xzibit spot for Chrome Valley Customs to the Mindy Kaling social series for Sharpie and the Selma Blair live shopping experience for GAP. The consistent choice across all of them is to build the film on something the person genuinely has a relationship with rather than renting their face for thirty seconds. Wayne has said the most commercial work he has made is also the most human, and that this is not a coincidence.

Published in April 2019, the trailer belongs to Wayne's Los Angeles period, alongside the Intel and CenturyLink films from the same year.

The trailer runs 0:54.