Trailer Editing

Here are my recommendations for how to take the right lessons from the trailers you look to for inspiration so you’re copying the things that made it successful and not just superficial qualities.

Making trailers for an existing fanbase is a wonderful place to find yourself in, but it comes with its own challenges because now you’re responsible for speaking the language of the community and hitting the right tone. Here are the trailers you might have to make under these circumstances and some tips for each!

The HUD/UI of a game is important to the players at the controls, but how important is it to someone watching a trailer or other marketing videos? In this post I break down how I consider which HUD/UI elements to include in the game trailers I make.

You should ALWAYS have a call to action on your trailer. Here are some guidelines for what is most important to include, and what you should reconsider including.

It’s recommended that games releasing on Steam put their store pages up AS SOON AS POSSIBLE, but I know for first time developers and hobbyists that making a trailer can be very intimidating. This article is me not only giving you permission to make a very loosely edited trailer, but recommending that you do (and how to do it)

If you read one blog post of mine about game trailer structure it should be this one, because this is a mistake I see a lot of games fall into, and it’s easy to fix!

Game trailers early in production sometimes have to create images for parts of the game which either don’t exist, aren’t implemented, or aren’t optimized for performance. Here are the ways to compensate for those shortcomings, and the varying amount of risk that comes with each approach

This post finds the balance and some of the best practices for how to cut a logo into a game trailer. A well placed logo is one important part of building brand recognition, but if it’s too indulgent it can also lower viewer retention.

Making an announce trailer for a game is tricky, because the game is early in development, so there isn’t much to show. And what you show will largely determined whether or not people talk about your game or not going forward.

I think most game trailers benefit from following one particular structure of introducing an idea, twisting it around, then showing the scope of the game, but the genre of the game changes what visuals to show for each section. Here are a few examples of how the content of each section will vary based on the game’s genre.

You know those trailers where the sound effects seem to score the trailer more than the music does? Here’s my advice for how to start making a trailer in that style.

Ssound editing is a difficult but very rewarding skill which can really increase the production value of a trailer. This is a basic look at how I think of sound editing in my trailers via previous works I’ve made from indie to AAA games.

A trailer edited with good sense of pace and rhythm can make a long trailer feel fast and engaging. Here’s how the launch trailer for Spiritfarer does an expert job of doing that just!

Breaking down dialogue is another essential step in trailer editing which involves listening or reading through all available dialogue, selecting what might work in the trailer, and organizing it. Here are the types of dialogue you should keep your eyes and ears out for!

Making a trailer land successfully when it’s posted is an entirely different beast than making a game trailer (which is hard enough as it is). In this post I talk to PR Marketing and Strategy expert Dana Trebella about the factors to consider when deciding when to launch your trailer!

Here’s a look at two realtime strategy game trailers which do a great job of making complicated games easy to understand and very entertaining to watch. There are a lot of good things to takeaway from these trailers if you’re making a trailer for a realtime strategy game.

To polish up your indie game trailer, check these 10 most common mistakes! If you’re a first time indie game maker, you’re also going to be a first time game trailer maker, so take these to heart and good luck!

The voice behind a gameplay explainer trailer can significantly affect its feel and how it’s perceived. Do you use the voice of someone from the game development team, a professional voice actor or a character from the game itself?

Creating an outline is a great way to quickly fill in a blank timeline and organize the story beats of a trailer. For games in particular it can also be a big help to the capture artist so they have some constraints to work within.

One of the trickiest parts of story trailer editing is introducing narrative threads, and making them weave cohesively together without confusing the audience.

The Marketing Funnel or Sales Funnel is a fundamental marketing concept which helps you understand the customers you need to target, and what their specific needs are depending on their “position” in the funnel. Are they new customers? Are they already interested, but want to know more? Here’s how to use the concept to design your trailers and campaign.

A good mindset for game capture is to think of how to make the biggest, broadest movements possible much like how a theater actor’s acting has to differ from that of a film actor.

When a game is visually confusing, you need to create chunks of information to make a readable trailer. Here I break down how Klei did this successfully in their launch trailer for Oxygen Not Included.

A list of the assets needed to start making a game trailer or to start working with a trailer editor!

Here are my best practices for creating legible and readable subtitles which are clear and timed well!

The opening of a trailer is probably the most critical part, because it can be the deciding factor for whether or not the person watching will continue watching after the first few seconds. Here are a few tried and true ways for making a great opening to your trailer!

Including review quotes in a trailer is a no-brainer, right? Just pick some positive things people said, and you’re good to go! Not so fast, your quotes might be saying more than you think.

A critical step before making a game trailer is simply taking an inventory of all the parts of the game you could potentially include in the trailer.

Breaking down visuals is an essential step in trailer editing where you take your footage, remove what is bad, and organize everything else into tiny bits. The time spent at the beginning of the project will save you hours of time while editing.

Accents are one of the most prominent trailer editing techniques which are a sign of a more experienced editor. What are they, and how do they help a trailer’s pacing and storytelling?

Here are a series of questions you can ask yourself when you need to evaluate the efficacy of the shots in your trailer based on the intention of the shot, and how the target audience will respond to it. A lot of creative decisions can feel arbitrary; these questions take out some of the “feel” and allow you to consider with some measure of objectivity.

A dip to black is a simple editing technique commonly used in trailers, sometimes used too much. What does the dip to black do when used to combine shots, and why does it work the way it does?

The most important part of a good game trailer is to find the heart of what makes the game unique. There are multiple ways to hone in on this one factor, so you can then structure your trailer around it.

Working with hundreds or thousands of individual pieces of dialogue and visuals is very intimidating, but if you’re able to sort all of those things into chunks, finding the right order for events is much easier. This is my process.

Who a trailer is targeting is something which can significantly affect how something should be presented. What does your target audience already know? When are they watching it? Where are they watching it? All of these factors can and should be considered when making a trailer.

People always ask me how long a game trailer should be. There’s no one answer, but there is a bigger question of how video length and label affects the audience expectations. Calibrate expectations properly, and the necessary length of video will become clearer.

The burden of depicting player verbs is something unique to the art of making game trailers. What is the best way to show them visually without resorting to a voiceover explaining the game point by point?

This is a multi part series of posts about the different “acts” of a trailer. In the age of scrolling feeds of auto-playing video, the Cold Open is more relevant than ever. Here is how it can hook the audience’s attention

The “line of rising action” is an idea people explore for narratives, but trailers have very different needs. Here’s my take on the unique line of rising action specifically for trailers.

Here are the varieties of trailers made for video games. Similar to TV spots for big budget films, game trailers come in all varieties with different target audiences, and messages to communicate to their audience.

BattleBlock Theater is a game whose trailer campaign I saw from both the outside and inside. What is to be done when development is so long and protracted?

Deus Ex: Human Revolution’s trailer campaign has more trailers in it than just about any video game I can think of. How the heck do you sustain such a relentless campaign, and how successful was it?

Hotline Miami’s trailers were released at a different time in the indie video game industry, but there are still lessons that can be taken from its eclectic approach to game trailers.

I worked on most of the trailers for Firewatch. I discuss the progression of this trailer campaign, and what made it a little unconventional

How is the audience’s interest affected based on the content you choose to put into a trailer, and how frequently you release trailers? This is the first of a 5 part series exploring that question via a handful of trailer campaigns that took different approaches. Here I analyze the trailer releases for Avengers: Age of Ultron and Infinity War.

I watch a lot of game trailers, but I don’t finish watching them all, because there are a handful of red flags that tell me the trailer doesn’t have planning, editing or execution. Here are those red flags.

Part 2 of my post on rewatching trailers after seeing the finished film. Here I analyze Black Panther’s full trailer, and how it so expertly makes us think we’re seeing a lot, but still showing very little.

It’s almost a ritual for me to rewatch a film’s trailers after I see the finished version. This is part 1 of what I look for in a trailer to do my best to reverse engineer the thought process of the trailer’s producers via the trailers for Black Panther.

The match cut is one of the most fundamental editing techniques. This is how trailer editors especially can use them to draw the audience into a story and hold onto their attention.

Cutting a trailer for the first time is very intimidating, but production music made specifically for trailers is a fantastic way to learn the typical 3-act structure of a trailer.

Transitions are the glue that make a great trailer; they're one of the hardest things to edit, but learning how to master the various techniques opens up a world of possibilities. 

How to make your game trailer like a literal tutorial, and why you might want to do it.

How to think of a game trailer as a video tutorial, and spice it up with some in-world flavor.

How to think of a game trailers like a tutorial, and communicate via simple shot selection and editing.

There are a number of things that I think about while editing a trailer that guide my decision making. Here's what they are, and how I arrived at them in my career as an editor.

"Mise en place" is a French culinary term referring to the set up required before cooking.

This post gets into the nitty gritty of how I organize my project folder structure, and templates for my editing projects.

Deconstructing the elements of a trailer is one of the best ways to learn how to make better trailers.

These are the key things that I focus on when I'm watching trailers analytically.

Most trailers follow an act-structure exemplified by the amazing trailer for The Matrix. If you want to learn the basics of story trailer editing, this is a good place to start!