What Picture Books Can Teach You About Trailer Editing

I've grown to love really good picture books for their beautiful art, relatable stories, sense of humor, heart, and humanity. The truly excellent ones also have a lot to teach about storytelling rhythm, pacing, and style (which yes, can be applied to trailers)

Currently, when I flip through picture books at my local library, I'm looking for a few things:

1. Appealing art

2. Not too many words per page

3. Stories which don't don't read like lectures or info dumps

Art, of course is number 1 for a picture book. There is no particular way I could describe what appeals to me because of all the books I've enjoyed there is no one art style. The same goes for games. I would never know what to ask for in a game's art style, but I know when I see something I've never seen before. Or which evokes a feeling I've never felt.

The words per page criteria is because I'm looking for a picture book with a pace that makes it a pretty quick read (maybe it's the trailer editor in me, haha). This is easily discernible from opening one page, because picture books tend to have a relatively consistent number of words per page. Pacing not only determines how quick a read the book will be, but also the tone and personality of the story. It's a very feel to have just a handful of words across two pages versus a page which has a paragraph with one illustration.

This book “Little Mole’s Wish” is a heart warming story about a little mole and their friend made of snow who they want to take on the bus with them.

For game trailers, the way I discern pacing is through a mix of the total runtime and the editing style within the first several seconds of the trailer. If, for example, the video is five minutes long and it opens with a fairly leisurely developer interview, this tells me the video is going to be more substantial and in-depth. If it's five minutes long and the first several seconds are frenetic and incredibly fast paced, that might tell me this might be an overwhelming and exhausting 5 minutes. Just like when looking at a picture book, my first impression of a trailer based on its editing pace and runtime can often determine whether I want to keep watching.

If you haven't read many picture books recently, the story vs lecture dichotomy is by far the thing that turns me on or off a book almost instantly. Pretty much all picture books have something to say, but a lot of them just outright say it rather than tell a story which evokes the message. For example, the message could be: "it's great to have loving friends." One children's book could literally have a line that says something like: "Derek was so happy he had such wonderful friends to get him through hard times." Or it could be even more explicit by just outright saying: "It's important to make good friends who will stick with you through thick and thin."

I don’t know how entertaining this book “All the World” is for children, but for adults it’s a nice “we’re all one people” sort of story.

This is like a game trailer which puffs itself up by saying how much fun its gameplay is after describing its features point by point. This is tantamount to telling people not only what they're looking at, but what to think! Especially in marketing, people are incredibly distrustful. When they consume marketing materials they want to draw their own conclusions by looking through marketing-speak to get to the "raw" message. This is why I prefer to "show my hand" as little as possible in my trailers. It feels more like a direct feed of information from the game (even though as soon as any footage is staged and edited together it has been constructed to convey a certain message)

The other thing I note in every picture book I read is whether or not the text rhymes. Picture books tend to have text which rhymes or doesn't rhyme at all. This determines the cadence and rhythm of my reading and can influence how engaged I am with the story. For example, there's a delightful series of "Bear" books my Karma Wilson which have a micro-structure of rhyming lines, and a macro-structure where the title of the book gets repeated several times. For example: "Bear Feels Scared." 

These Bear books are an absolute delight with wonderful illustrations and cute tales of friendship and every day worries.

From the first page I know every two lines will rhyme and every three pages or so are when the book's title will get repeated. 

In the deep, dark woods by the Strawberry Vale,
a big bear lumbers down a small crooked trail.

Bear's tummy growls as he looks for a snack.
But it's cold cold cold, so the bear turns back.

He is not home yet when the sun starts to set...
And the bear feels scared...

This structure creates two levels of anticipation (which keeps me engaged). Knowing there's a rhyme in each stanza piques my curiosity as to what words will rhyme. But if it were just stanza after stanza of rhymes, that pacing would get monotonous. The lines which punctuate the stanzas with the book title are just enough to keep things fresh while also building a second level of anticipation. Not only do I grow to expect the phrase "and the bear feels scared" I'm ALSO anticipating when that will change to presumably, a moment in the story when the bear is no longer scared. 

This book also has a micro/macro structure where each segment is punctuated by “All the world…”

In game trailer editing, I often recommend repeating the parts of a game's loop so that it becomes very clear to the audience how the game works. But I also know just showing it over and over will become monotonous, so I try to find ways to break it up and keep it fresh. For example, in the trailer I made for Noita, the middle has a section where I repeat this structure: 

1. Wand recipe

2. Dominating with the powerful wand

3. Player death.

I did this a couple times, but in the third version where I make an absurdly long wand I subverted the expectation by not showing how the wand works and instead showed the player falling in magic good which turned them into a duck. This is an example of the "show a game concept twice, but no more than three times" rule I generally follow. Earlier in the trailer I made montages of verbs to show how versatile the game's systems are, but I only made two of these montages before moving on, because I wanted to stay a step ahead of the audience. People are VERY quick to pick up on patterns and rhythms!

While the viewer doesn't "read" a trailer in the same way as someone reading a picture book, editing patterns can intentionally or unintentionally determine how engaged someone is with the trailer. For example, I've read some picture books which couldn't seem to decide whether they're a story which rhymes or not. Some might have one rhyme within the first three pages, then nothing, then another one much later on. This throws off my reading because I don't know what to expect (and not in a fun and exciting way). I don't know anything about the world of picture book writing, but if I were doing it I'd try to make it rhyme 100% or not at all, especially within the first few pages.

This is why the first several seconds of a trailer are so important. There is so much you can communicate consciously or unconsciously with the editing style. For example, if the first fifteen seconds feature a bunch of cuts and actions which match the beat of the music, you can probably be pretty sure the rest of the trailer is going to be like that too. But if only some of it matches up, that can make you question the craft of the person who made the trailer (and maybe even the game)

Even picture books which have no rhyming at all can have their own sense of rhythm through repetition of dialogue or motifs. For example, one of my favorites is "I Want My Hat Back" about a bear who has lost their hat and is checking in with several animals to see if they've seen his hat. Each of them has a different response, and every time the bear doesn't receive more information he says: "Okay, thank you anyway." This gives a sort of comfort in knowing what's coming, but also knowing it's going to be slightly different each time.

“I Want My Hat Back” is one of three books in the “Hat Trilogy” and they’re all very fun (and a bit subversive)

For myriad reasons I recommend going to your local library and browsing the picture books to see more of what I'm talking about in this article! I have an ongoing list of favorites in this Amazon list if you're curious. Some takeaways learned from picture books to apply to your trailers:

• Set the pacing of your trailer based on the mood and feeling you want to evoke about your game

• Don't use your trailer to tell people what to think. Tell your story and let them decide for themselves.

• Start your trailer with a specific editing style to set the audience's expectations.

• Think of the structure of the "chunks" that comprise the moment to moment parts of your trailer and how they fit into the bigger structure. How can you create expectation/engagement through repetition and then subvert it to keep things fresh?