# How do you make a movie trailer with AI?

**Short answer:** Lock the look and the cast first, build every location as a set of camera angles, write each shot as one action with a concrete light source, render, then cut fast to a score with silence before each hit. Our Dragon Rising trailer was made this way, and our series trailers run 30 to 46 seconds.

URL: https://arc.katechon.technology/answers/how-to-make-an-ai-trailer
Updated: 2026-10-18

## 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

1. Locked the design language first: heavy bone-white powered suits on a gunmetal frame, red three-lens optics.
2. 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.
3. Wrote 42 multi-shot units with one action per shot and a concrete low-key light source.
4. 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.
5. Rendered on Seedance 2.0 Fast at 720p.
6. 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](https://arc.katechon.technology/films/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.

## Related answers

- [How do you make an AI short film?](https://arc.katechon.technology/answers/how-to-make-an-ai-short-film): Write a short script with one clear arc, fix the look and cast as reference images, storyboard 40 to 400 shots, render each as a short clip…
- [How do you keep locations consistent in AI video?](https://arc.katechon.technology/answers/how-to-keep-locations-consistent-in-ai-video): Treat each location like a character: give it its own reference, and for scenes with several camera angles, build it as a set of camera…
- [How do you keep costumes and props consistent in AI video?](https://arc.katechon.technology/answers/how-to-keep-costumes-and-props-consistent-in-ai-video): Write the state of every costume and prop into every shot (helmet on or off, sword in hand or sheathed), give each distinct look its own…
- [Why does AI video add voices or lines you did not write?](https://arc.katechon.technology/answers/why-does-ai-video-add-random-voices): Native-audio video models fill silence: given a near-empty shot, they sometimes invent a voice-over or a stray line.
- [How do you add music to an AI drama?](https://arc.katechon.technology/answers/how-to-add-music-to-an-ai-drama): Score in the edit, not in the video model: generate or license music separately, place it under the episode and mix to a consistent…