Trailer · Noir26s
Rain Check
Logline: A private investigator hired to find a missing accountant realises the woman who hired him is the one the accountant was running from.
Creature Feature · 1 minute target
Make a trailer for a movie that does not exist
The fake trailer is its own art form: thirty seconds that promise a film nobody will make. Here it is built from scenes you actually shoot, so the promise looks real.
Boiler Room, a scene in the Creature Feature genre. Logline: Wide shot of the flooded boiler room. Obiora wades in with a flashlight; the beam catches ripples moving against him. He stops and lowers the light. Something exhales in the dark.
The trick is that nothing is faked
A fake trailer is a real trailer for an imaginary film. The way to make one that lands is to treat the imaginary film seriously for exactly as long as it takes to shoot three scenes. Write the logline as if the whole thing were going into production, pick the genre with the tone you want to parody or honour, and let the drafter write the beat sheet. Then shoot only the beats a trailer would use: the wide that sets the world, the two-shot where the problem is stated, the close-up where someone decides.
Three finished scenes is enough. Pick them in the trailer tab, keep five to eight seconds of each, write the tagline, and cut. The result opens on the tagline card, runs your three shots, and ends on the title with coming soon beneath it.
Genres that make good fake trailers
The genres with the strongest visual signatures work best: creature feature for its flashlight beams and things glimpsed in the dark, western for its empty streets at noon, dystopia for white corridors and one forbidden colour, espionage for rain and tram windows. Screwball comedy fakes well too, because a two-shot of two people talking over each other reads as a comedy in a second.
Casting matters more than in a full flick. The audience sees each face once, so pick characters whose presets read instantly, or generate a character with a very specific description. A costume reference keeps the look sharp in the one shot that person gets.
Taglines and titles
The tagline card does most of the comedy or the dread. Keep it under ten words and in the present tense. The title goes on the coming-soon card and on the end of the tagline card, so pick a title that sits well in capitals. The drafter suggests a tagline when it writes the sheet; the title is yours from the start and can be changed on the flick card at any time.
What you cannot fake
You cannot use a real person’s face: characters are generated from descriptions, and uploads are limited to costumes, sets and props. You cannot reference an existing film, studio or franchise by name in the beats or the title, and the content guidelines apply to trailers the same as to everything else. Everything inside those lines is fair game, and most of the fun lives there.
Made the same way
Each with the logline or beat that made itScene · Ghost Story10s
Lamp Room
Beat: Hyacinth climbs the last spiral stair into the lamp room with a candle. The lamp is already lit. She says, quietly, "I thought you had gone." Slow push in on her face.
Trailer · Western24s
The Tab
Logline: A drifter rides into a town where the saloon owner has bought every debt on the street, and offers to settle all of them with a single hand of cards.
Questions
- Do I need to make the whole film to make a fake trailer?
- No. Shoot three beats of the beat sheet, pick them in the trailer tab and cut. The rest of the sheet can stay unshot forever.
- How much does a fake trailer cost?
- Two credits for the beat sheet, two for the trailer, plus three scenes. At 480p standard a six-second scene is 18 credits, so a full fake trailer is often under sixty credits.
- Can the trailer have a voice-over?
- Not a separate narrator track. Scenes render with their own sound and dialogue, and the tagline card carries the words. Write the voice-over as a line a character says on camera if you want it heard.
- Who owns a fake trailer I make?
- You own it, as described in the terms of service. Copyright rules differ between countries, so get local advice before using it in anything commercial. Read the terms.
- Can I make it look like an old film?
- Choose a genre whose tone block suits the look and describe the period in the beats and the sets. The renderer follows the description; there is no separate filter.
Start with the sample logline, or your own
The studio opens with this logline, genre and runtime filled in. Change anything.