Basic Guide to Trailer Sound Editing
Good sound editing is one of the most difficult parts of making a trailer; I think it's one of the surest signs of an experienced editor. If you look at the timeline of a big blockbuster Hollywood trailer, you'll see a handful of track for video and A LOT of tracks for sound. But the skill doesn't come from the quantity of sound in the sequence, it's from ensuring each sound serves a purpose and works well in concert with the rest.
One of the most common mistakes I see are game trailers which layer dialogue, sound effects and music on top of each other without regard for what is the most important thing to be heard at that given moment. This is like if you tried to make a rock song where every band member had their solo at the exact same time. Ideally, the "hero audio" will shift between the vocals, lead guitar, bass guitar, drums and any other instruments present. If you give each audio element their time to be the hero, the trailer will feel dynamic and always full of new and surprising things to hear.
For game trailers, the hero audio will shift between the narration, dialogue, sound effects and music. It's not necessarily so explicit as entire chunks of the trailer dedicated to one over another, it's more like a game of hot potato where the focus constantly switches back and forth. Let's take a look at an example using an old fan trailer of mine for Enslaved: Odyssey to the West:
This trailer was very much intended to be cut in the Hollywood movie style which has much more trailer sound design than my typical indie game trailer; there are lot more hits, rises, and whooshes on top of game audio and dialogue. That said, the editing principles I applied in this trailer are ones I still follow to this day.
The music starts in the hero position with a BOOM before fading into the background to then pass the hero status onto the voice of the slave ship announcer who stays there until about 9 seconds in. This is when a series of drums assert themselves and there are a few quick cuts of the character Monkey escaping.
Music is frequently what determines where there is room for dialogue/narration and other game audio. My podcast co-host and trailer editor friend Ric Thomasdescribes these parts as the "peaks and troughs" of the music. The opening boom and the drum beats are peaks, and the "empty" space in between are the troughs where you can fit in other sounds or dialogue. Some music tracks have peaks and troughs nicely built into the cue, but other times it's necessary to do some creative music editing to create them. This is one reason trailers frequently stop down the music, to create space for non-music audio moments.
Here's a timeline from a Hollywood trailer editor featured in this interview. There's a lot of sound in this timeline O_O
After the big drum beats, the narration continues in the hero position with: "Compliance will be rewarded" before another series of drum beats. Within this second drum beat section there are some technology sound effects for when the character Trip uses a computer. In this small section the hero audio swapped from the narration, to the music, and then to the sound effects.
The narrator continues: "Non-compliance will be rewarded with pain." This overlaps a bit with the sound of the metal doors opening, but hopefully that door open sound doesn't hog too much attention. Around the word "with..." a sound effect rise starts to build anticipation for the next shot of Monkey jumping; this rise sound briefly becomes the hero audio before the music kicks in strong and carries us out of the cold open. There are a handful of shots here where game sound effects assert themselves, like when Monkey falls out of the ship, and when Trip presses the ejector button on her escape pod.
This is a lot to take in for only 30 seconds of trailer, but if you can watch, listen, and analyze trailers in this way, you can learn a lot about sound editing. Of course, applying what you've learned is another level of difficulty, but learning to hear is a good place to start. Let's look at a less intense game trailer which shows the same ideas; here's the trailer I made for the game Agent A: A Puzzle in Disguise:
Again, the hero audio starts with the music which then cedes the position to the Ruby LaRue character saying: "Let's play a little game" which is quickly followed by a few music peaks, one of which I combined with the sound of a capsule being inserted. I'll frequently overlap a sound effect onto a music peak as a means to enhance that moment. In this case overlapping music and sound make them both shine; what you want to avoid is one audio element doing its own then which then gets interrupted by the other.
Ruby's narration continues in the hero position while a trailer sound effect rise builds underneath it before it leads up to the shot of the cabinet breaking. This is immediately followed by another music peak over the studio logo and some character dialogue which is punctuated by the sound of a camera shutter.
I generally think of the layers of audio in this order:
Music
Dialogue/Narration
Trailer Audio
Game audio
I prioritize the peaks of the music cue, because music is typically the strongest driving force of the trailer. If I'm using a music cue with a lot of strong dramatic moments I always want to make the most of them. If there's a big music peak which has to be brought down in volume because a line of dialogue continued over it, it will always feel like a missed opportunity.
Next most important is the narration and dialogue because if it's in the trailer it's necessary to tell the story of talk about the game. I very seldom use typical Hollywood movie trailer style sound design in my game trailers, but if I do use it, I'll add it in next to build the moments of anticipation, hits, transitions etc. Trailer sound design is like the punctuation of a sentence, but oftentimes it's used to hold your attention for the next thing that's going to happen.
A waveform from my tutorial for marking up music in preparation for trailer editing.
The markers are mostly peaks, and the space in between are the troughs.
Lastly is when I add the game audio which also functions as punctuation to the words or scenes of the trailer. They can be a comma, a period, exclamation point, whatever it is the trailer needs to mark a particular moment. Some game audio will need to be played underneath music or dialogue, but I always try to make sure there's some in between the dialogue and music peaks.
One of the last steps when I'm making a trailer is to watch it and listen to hear whether or not the trailer feels like a run on sentence. If I feel like the individual thoughts and ideas aren't divided into sections, I'll want to find a way to use the music or sound to make it clear the trailer has moved onto a new idea.
When you get a decent handle on how to sound design a trailer well, a huge world of possibilities opens up, and it's very rewarding. A trailer with good sound design can have a lot of texture, be incredibly entertaining, and also give the audience a much better feel for the game!
