How to Edit a Hollywood Blockbuster Trailer

Published on May 22, 2020

Post Production

blockbuster, blockbuster trailer, movie trailer, Post Production

How to make a trailer

You probably know the famous sentence ‘In a world…’, it’s an opening for a lot of movie trailers. Well it is all voiced by Redd Pepper, a man with a booming bass voice which is ideal for a movie trailer. Like the trailer from Space Jam for example. Redd insured his vocal chords for £10 million. But we had the feeling that most of these voice over trailers weren’t really epic blockbusters, and then we came across a video from Auralnauts about ‘How to make a blockbuster movie trailer’. They really made an accurate breakthrough of the blockbuster movie trailers that Hollywood often shows for new movies. So we decided to follow their steps and make our own blockbuster trailer.

The only problem we had was the fact that we aren’t making a feature film. So we had to come up with a new simple story that we could create a trailer for. So… In a world, where everyone has to wear shoes with laces, one man stands up and rises against the dictatorship. He wears velcros and he wears them proudly!

shooting the blockbuster trailer

A good trailer needs to capture the audience. So you need to show your main characters, some awesome vfx shots and some actions scenes but you want to show as little information as possible. A good trailer doesn’t spoil the entire movie already. So on that note we went outside and shot some shots for our trailer, we also created some studio shots. We made sure that the main story was present in the trailer. Once we got the shots, we jumped into the post production part.

Editing the trailer

The video editing part was quite easy, we just had to follow along with the example by Auralnauts. The music score was way harder, first we looked for some songs with the same amount of bpm (beats per minute) but we had a hard time finding the right scores, especially for the slower and more quiet parts. We decided to create a part of our score ourselves with the use of audio loops, like a violin, drums and a piano. Since the example by Auralnauts also mentioned a cover of a famous song, we decided to contact Annelies (ANLS), a friend of Gilles, to sing our vocals of the famous song “These boots are made for walking” by Nancy Sinatra. She did an amazing job and once we found our scores and added the vocals, all we had to do was add some extra sound effects.

Storyblocks

For the opening shot we decided to search a drone shot on Storyblocks. It’s an online library full of HD and 4K stock footage, overlays, transitions, customizable After Effects templates and so much more. And with a full Storyblocks license you also get access to Storyblocks Audio, where we found a lot of loops, sound effects and scores. So it’s an ideal tool for every filmmaker.