Elevating Your Editing - Advanced

This is the third part of a series of posts for editors looking for the next area of focus once they've reached a certain level of expertise. The first post highlighted easy too fix pitfalls I see in beginner video editors' work. The second detailed adding some stylistic touches once you've managed to hit a baseline of quality. This post contains the trailer editing techniques I consider the next step up towards a more professional level.

The firsts posts were about cleaning up mistakes and adding a bit of style; these techniques are the tools to really take control of the pacing of a trailer. It's normal to start by taking one piece of music and cutting a montage to it, but the next step is to take one or more music cues to create unique sections and moments within the trailer. 

Taking control of the pacing and rhythm of the trailer rather than letting any one element dictate it is an extremely powerful ability to have as a trailer editor. If you can get a good handle on how to do these techniques you can keep yourself busy for years and years practicing their application.

This fan trailer I made for Uncharted 3 is one of the first I made which felt like I finally got a handle on these techniques.

The Stopdown

This is when trailer takes a brief pause for dramatic effect. It can be to highlight a joke, a mini climax, an action scene, a very tense line of dialogue, or any number of things. This is a more advanced technique because it requires the editor to either know how to edit the music to stop down when they want it to (here's my tutorial for how to reverb out music), or find the right music cue with a stopdown built in at the time which fits their trailer's story.

The stopdown is a powerful technique because it allows the editor to control the pace of the trailer's momentum. Otherwise they're beholden to the whims of the music. Stopdowns let the editor break up the trailer into more bite sized chunks; this is helpful when the energy of the trailer feels either overwhelming or exhausting to keep up with. It gives the audience a bit of a breath, while also signaling there's more exciting stuff to come. Though too many stopdowns can make a trailer feel like it's showing too much.

For a more in-depth look at stopdowns you can read this previous post.

This trailer for The Departed (and most movie trailers) are chock full of both stopdowns and accents.

Accents

Accents are another key editing concept which can punch up the editing of a trailer. If you've seen TV shows like Scrubs, 30 Rock or Family Guy it's like those scenes where characters say something like: "This is like the time when [this thing happened]," then they briefly cut to show [the thing happening] and then back. 

Trailers without accents can feel like a run on sentence where one line of dialogue is followed immediately by another with no breaks or pauses. That's why I also refer to accents as the punctuation of the trailer. In a trailer they can really be a very tiny little moment or sound effect, just something to break things up periodically to create peaks and valleys between each moment.

For a more in-depth look at accents you can read this previous post.

This trailer for No Country For Old Men isn't as fast paced as many other trailers, but it still has lots of stopdown and accent moments.

Dialogue Editing

Of these three, I think this is the most difficult to master, which is to make a story trailer told solely via the dialogue without the aid of voiceover or title cards. Doing this for a movie, series, or multi hour game is incredibly difficult, but it makes a world of difference when the alternative is a trailer comprised of a bunch of scenes which don't create a logical sequence of events.

This creates narrative chaos and teaches the audience the trailer is not going to tell them a coherent story. And when you learn that about the trailer, your focus will shift to something else in hopes of finding something less confusing whether it's about the art style, music, tone, game mechanics, etc. This scenario is especially tragic when it's a trailer whose primary purpose is to tell a story.

This trailer for Crystar is my go-to example for a trailer with a chaotic and incoherent narrative.

If you want help taming a massive project of dialogue I recommend this post about thinking in story chunks. This explains my method for how to select dialogue and put it into a logical sequence which works for the trailer even if it re-contexualizes lines from the story in a way which isn't chronological or originally as intended. 

It's a very tricky process, and it's one part of trailer editing which feels especially like carving something out of a piece of marble. 10-20 hours of dialogue can get selected down to 4 hours, and then down to 1 hour, to 15 minutes, to 5 minutes and then 90-120 seconds. Each step of the way you hopefully get a handle on what lines of dialogue are inessential, and which ones pack a lot of narrative details into a short amount of time. 

So those are the three things which I think separate intermediate editors from more advanced ones. I think editors who can handle these concepts are on a whole other level, and this is where things start to get really exciting to watch!