I wish I'd noticed this thread years ago: making good trailers is hard and there are some great examples here!
Frankly, all of my trailers, except for one, are
mĆŖh.
The only one I'm happy with is my
Eternals: Chronological Cut. It's the only one I made from scratch. Instead of stringing together a bunch of shots from the movie and then trying to smooth the audio, I started with the dialog.
- First I figured out what I wanted to say, not the precise wording but the message.
- Then searched for lines across many sources: the film, extras on the blu-ray, interviews with and promos by the cast, a walk-through of the accompanying game.
- Lined them up, made sure every major character got a line, spliced audio together to create new lines where needed.
- Only then did I add video. Work and rework it until I got it down to exactly 1 minute runtime.
- Adjusted pauses in dialog to fit the visuals (mostly reducing pauses!).
- Overlay music, and add subtitles (which shows who is speaking, and accommodates the sign language shot).