How to Make a Movie Trailer: The 5 Top Elements to Consider for Beginners

There is a way to hook your audience for the movies you create, and that is through their trailers. The best editors have mastered this skill, and you can break down the same secret formula that they use. This guide shows you how to make a movie trailer and how you can apply it to your own projects as a beginner.

Part 1. How to Make a Movie Trailer to Highlight Your Story in Seconds

The average movie trailer is anywhere between two and three minutes long, and within those two to three minutes, you need to make sure that you do a few things. The first step is getting your audience intrigued and invested in the trailer. The second thing you have to do is make sure that they have a good understanding of what the movie is about. The last thing that you must do is leave your audience wanting more.

Now, within that two-to-three-minute window, you really don't have a lot of time for complex ideas or character development. What you really want your audience to walk away with is the feeling of the movie.

There are five parts to editing a movie trailer. You have the hook, the introduction, the rising tension, the climax, and the outro. If you execute and deliver the feeling on all five parts of the trailer, you're going to hook your audience and make them want to watch your movie.

1. The Hook

The first section is the hook. This is what's supposed to get people excited or lean in to watch the rest of the trailer, and there are many ways to do this for your film trailer. A strong hook often opens with incredible sound design and a voiceover that immediately makes your audience lean in and question what's going on.

You can set the stage by giving your audience a grand-scale problem right away. This creates that shock value and surprises them, using sound design and a bold moment to get their attention.

You don't try to bore your audience with character development or complex storylines. The goal is simply to hook your audience.

A hook often begins with mysterious music and a line of dialogue that hints at something happening. The intro is vague yet intriguing, and it sets the stage by showing a problem on a grand scale. The number one emotion you're trying to draw within the first 15 to 30 seconds is Intrigue. It is one of the strongest and most effective emotions to get people to want to know more and actually be invested in what they're watching.

Within those 15 to 30 seconds, you also have to set the stage for the problem. Whatever the biggest problem is in your film or documentary, you have to make it feel like this grand, big, important problem. And the biggest thing is that we don't know how we're going to solve it. The intro needs to almost ask this question, but the most important part is to try to leave it unanswered.

2. Main Intro

The second section of your movie trailer is what is called the introduction. It is where the premise of your film is broken down within the next 20 to 40 seconds. In this section of the trailer, the viewers start to understand what the film is going to be about and that there is a significant urgency to what is happening.

At this point, the story focuses on the core idea rather than unrelated parts of the larger world, because in these 20 to 40 seconds, there is no way to communicate everything about the story. The goal here is not to explain every emotion or every feeling. Those 20 to 40 seconds should be used to come from a place where the audience is coming from, and try not to know anything about the movie.

So, lay it all out in plain language. Try to make it as digestible as possible and show somebody who has no idea about your movie that trailer, and let them tell you what the film is about. Show them that little piece, that little section, and ask them if they can recite it back to you: What is my movie about? That is a great indication to know if your trailer is heading in the right direction.

3. Rising Tension

The third section of the trailer is called the rising tension. This is where you kick it up a level in the trailer. You really start building towards the situation that is the most important thing to ever happen in the story, and that alone is enough to scream tension in your movie. This part also introduces the issue of whether the character can figure this out.

A very important detail here is closing it out with the unknown, because the characters have no idea what is going to happen next.

When doing this section of your movie trailer, there are a few things to keep in mind. Number one, the pacing needs to start picking up, and pacing means the amount of cutting that is happening, as well as the dialogue and the music.

At this point, your audience needs to have a defined antagonist, or whatever the adversity is in your story. What is your main character up against, and how is it affecting them?

The idea is to keep the dialogue short and to keep the scenes kind of short and start ramping things up a bit. By this point, your audience should have a really good idea of your movie without revealing a lot.

4. Climax

Climax is where you need to come to the peak of excitement in your trailer. Pacing is extremely important at this point, and it has to feel like the fastest part. Typically, in the movie trailer climax, the focus is on how dire the situation is or how badly the character needs to succeed.

In this part of a trailer, the dialogue is often cut to just a few words, the cuts start happening a lot faster, and the goal is to drive the main storyline home. This section also reinforces that grand scale of storyline, so the audience understands how intense the situation has become.

When you are editing your climax section, again, keep in mind that you need to push the pacing, compress the dialogue to its simplest state, and only tell the audience what is absolutely necessary - what they need to know in this section. It also needs to feel like the situation your characters are in, or whatever they are going through in your story, is a big, life-altering situation for everybody involved.

5. Outro

And now the final bit is the outro. This is where the trailer tends to leave its final question or final statement, with an extra layer of storyline that hasn't been fully shown in the rest of the trailer.

For your outro, whatever the underlying theme of the film is, have your audience walk away with that and have them think about it. Just like the intro, the audience is intrigued by finding out a little bit more. It can be a dialogue from your character that stands out or a muted action scene that may confuse your viewers and leave them stranded.

Part 2. Create Short Movie Trailers in HitPaw Online AI Video Generator

If you want to share short 5- to 10-second movie trailers on different social media platforms, there is no need to download any software that might feel too complicated to use. HitPaw AI Video Generator gives you a simple way to create these short previews in just a few seconds. You can do this either with text prompts or by uploading images from your movie scenes, and both options work smoothly for beginners or anyone who just wants fast results.

HitPaw AI Video Generator includes a lot of helpful features. You can choose any aspect ratio based on the device you want your trailer to play, and then set the resolution that fits your project. The negative prompt section is also there, which helps you point out what you do not want to appear in your short movie trailer. It also comes with different built-in models like PixVerse, Kling AI, Hailuo AI, Google VEO3, and more, and you can use any of these to shape the kind of trailer you want to create.

• Step 1.To start, open either the Text to Video or Image to Video tool.

  

• Step 2.In the text-to-video option, choose a generation model, write a detailed prompt that explains what your movie is about, the camera angles, and other things in 2000 characters. Then adjust the video settings.

  
  

  Turn on auto sound if you want background audio, and add negative prompts if any.

  

• Step 3.In the image section, upload multiple images, type in your prompts, and create a 5- to 10-second trailer.

  

• Step 4.Click Generate, and select Download.

  

Part 3. FAQs of How to Make a Movie Trailer

Conclusion on How to Make a Movie Trailer

So, in this guide, you've discovered how to make a movie trailer and grab the attention of your audience using the key elements that the best editors rely on. There are a million different ways that you can creatively edit your trailer with sound design and music, and you can definitely play around with the story structure with the help of offline and online movie trailer makers.

When you understand how each piece works together, your trailer stops feeling random and starts feeling like a real preview that gets viewers interested in what you made. That's the heart of learning all about this 2-3-minute short video content, and now you know exactly how to approach it from start to finish.