What a trailer needs that a film does not
A trailer is pure selection: the strongest second of many shots, cut to music. It needs more shots than its runtime suggests, a recognizable lead in the first seconds, geography the viewer can follow despite fast cuts, and sound design that sets up each hit. AI helps most with the volume of striking shots; it helps least with continuity, which you have to design in.
How we made Dragon Rising
- Locked the design language first: heavy bone-white powered suits on a gunmetal frame, red three-lens optics.
- Built each of 16 locations as 4–6 camera plates, and had every shot reference a specific plate, so the space reads the same between cuts.
- Wrote 42 multi-shot units with one action per shot and a concrete low-key light source.
- Tagged every shot with helmet state, because helmets flipped on and off between cuts until a rule said named leads are always bare-headed and troopers always sealed.
- Rendered on Seedance 2.0 Fast at 720p.
- Cut fast, keeping the highest-motion second of each internal shot, and gated a generated score with six chapter cues so silence lands before each hit.
Trailers for a series
For our vertical series we cut trailers of 30 to 46 seconds from finished episodes rather than rendering new footage: the hook from episode one, the central conflict, a reveal held back, and a final line. For a musical series, song-driven cuts with lyric captions worked better than dialogue trailers. Burned-in English captions also matter on platforms that detect the language automatically.
Pitfalls
- Invented dialogue: Seedance put a stray radio line into the Dragon Rising opening. We dropped it from the captions, but it is still in the audio; check every clip's sound.
- Lookalike faces: a lead who reads like a famous action star gets shots blocked. Design faces that are clearly nobody you know.
- Too many locations: each needs plates; keep the count to what the story requires.
Watch the result: Dragon Rising (6:58).
Where Katechon Arc fits
Arc handles the planning, references, camera plates and rendering of a trailer's shots, and keeps the cast consistent across them.
Arc does not cut to music or design sound; the trailer edit, score and mix happen in a video editor.