How I cut a trailer.

The first thing I do is watch trailers on YouTube, a lot of them. 

Two trailers that were the most inspirational to me were the season three Sons of Anarchy trailer and the season one trailer for The Sopranos. 

The SOA trailer had a rhythm I really liked, so much so I downloaded the video from YouTube, imported it into Final Cut Pro and cut it up. I wanted to see what the construction of the edit looked like, what shot lengths were and where they dropped in exposition. 

The Sopranos trailer also had a great way of dropping in exposition and using V.O. made for a nice shortcut, one I didn’t have, since I didn’t have any V.O.

Jason Steele was kind enough to give me permission to use his music and that’s when things really got going. I went through the sound file and dropped markers on where the big beats were in the music and also where the music changed. 

I needed to get exposition out for anyone not familiar with the show. I also needed a big cool fucking shot to open with. Don (John Colella) has the line “Who the fuck are you?” and it’s within a really cool fucking shot, which made that a no-brainer to open with. 

When Annie (Reamy Hall) pops out of the corner with a gun asking another question, “What the fuck is going on?” and is answered with “Bad shit,” that gives the audience an idea that this story has armed conflict on deck. 

The lines from Father Eddie (Vincent Guastaferro) and Marty Five (Chris Mulkey) covered the exposition about the vampire and mafia parts of the story. The other lines from Aldo (Peter Spruyt), Cookie (Retta) and Sixty (Antonio Moon) were to show there’s humor mixed in with this crime-world.

Having the two mother-in-laws from hell (Marcia Wallace & Rae Allen) going head-to-head for one clip, lets the audience know there’s more than one family dealt with in this story.

Pulling reviews to drop in lets the audience know someone thinks the thing is good and why they think so.

The rest of the editing challenge is really about composition and visual rhythm. When very quick cuts fly by, your eye finds a point in the image to rest on briefly. If the subsequent image requires your eye to find the next point, you lose the impact of that image because your eye can’t find it fast enough. 

I had a rough cut of this trailer and there were three shots that kept jumping out at me as being wrong and I couldn’t figure out why at first. It was the composition of the images against each other that didn’t work. 

It was like being back in art school hanging a show of photographs on a wall in a gallery. The flow of the images from left-to-right need to “sing” visually. It’s the same with editing a moving image, especially when that moving image is fractions of a second long. 

I hope all this rambling helps you cut your own trailers! 

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