Elevating Your Trailer Editing - Intermediate

This is the second part of a series of posts for editors who are looking for the next areas of focus to significantly improve the quality of their editing. If you haven't read the previous post, you can do that here.

The previous post was all about correcting common mistakes and pitfalls of inexperienced editors, but here is where things start to get fun. The previous post was basically about fixing your spelling and grammar, this one is about where you go once you have the basics down and are ready to add style and flavor to your trailer editing.

Cut to the Beat

Cutting to the beat of music is probably the first and most basic stylistic choice of an editor, and especially a trailer editor. It's the stuff sizzle reels, music videos, promos, commercials and trailers are made of, but typically doesn't have much place in narrative film editing (unless it's something like Baby Driver)

Cutting to the beat indicates to me you put that much more consideration into the editing and because I know you put in the effort, I'm more inclined to invest my own time to see what your video has in store. The more intention put into a video, the more I think the video is worthy of attention.

Cutting to the beat doesn't just mean putting the literal cut between shots on a beat, it can mean syncing actions within a shot to the beat, or matching the movement of something with a musical flourish. I generally prefer to cut to actions rather than put my cuts on the beat, because putting literal cuts on the beat can sometimes trap you into a predictable editing rhythm which will get rote after not too long.

I prefer to think of it as syncing to the beat, because keeping your eyes and ears open for sync possibilities opens you up to snappy moments, flowing movements, and everything in between.

This amazing trailer for the multiplayer mode for Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood is incredibly well synced to the music.

Music Editing

It's one thing to cut a trailer to an epic piece of music which is already roughly trailer length, or a production music cue which has all the typical trailer highs and lows already built into it, and it's another to take one or more pieces of music, and edit them together to create an entirely new composition specifically suited to the movie or game trailer you're making.

It could be a matter of taking the beginning of one cue, and the end of another and combining them with either some tight editing, a cross dissolve, a sound effect rise, or better yet some sort of stop down moment to end one music cue and a continuation with another. The skill is in creating a good dramatic musical arc to the trailer suitable to the movie or game. One music cue alone might be too flat, another might build up too fast or too slow. Or the trailer's story structure might necessitate a hard turn in order to fit the tone of the different story beats.

It's hard enough to find good music for a trailer, never mind finding two or more cues which can be cut together and still sound cohesive. Therefore, whenever I see/hear a trailer which has paid attention to sculpting the music to fit the trailer I can tell the editor has more experience under their belt.

This professionally made trailer cuts together what sounds like around 4 pieces of music to create a great dramatic arc

Sound Effects Editing

Good integration of sound effects is another skill which makes me pay extra attention to a trailer simply by virtue of the fact that adding an additional element to the soundtrack means that much more work for the editor. If I can tell they really made efforts to use sound effects to enhance the trailer, I'm much much more likely to pay attention.

Whether it's simply a trailer where the sound effects feel like they're stepping on the toes of the music or dialogue, the sound effects accent the beats of the trailer, or there are trailer specific sound effects to guide the audience through the cuts, build anticipation and heighten the cuts.

Pretty much all the Battlefield trailers do a lot with sound effects editing 

These three things each have tremendous amount of nuance which a trailer editor can play with for their entire career, but dipping your toe into them can significantly increase the quality of your trailer editing. The more things you consider when editing a trailer, the more fun and sophisticated the trailer can be. The baseline was about fixing common mistakes, but the intermediate level is where the fun really starts and the biggest potential for leaps in quality are possible.