Trailer grammar in sixty seconds
A trailer is not a short film. It has its own grammar:
- Tease, don't tell. Fragments of the most dramatic beats. No complete scenes, no resolutions.
- Escalate. Atmosphere → character glimpses → stakes → spectacle. Each act louder than the last.
- Accelerate. Shots get shorter as the trailer builds — 6 seconds becomes 4 becomes 2.
- Land on the title. Hard cut to a near-empty frame that a title (and a release date) can own.
The Trailer format preset plans all of this: pick it and the director-brain writes an escalating montage with shrinking durations, sparse one-liner dialogue, and a title-card composition as the final beat.
Cast your models like a producer
This is the lesson where model casting earns its keep. Shows lets you assign a Coverage model (dialogue, standard beats) and a Spectacle model (establishing wides, action) per show — and override per shot.
For a trailer:
- Spectacle: Seedance 2.0 (4 cr/s). Your wides are the trailer — the dead city, the wall of flame. Pay for them.
- Coverage: LTX-2.3 Pro (2 cr/s). Character glimpses and inserts don't need the premium engine.
- Check the model chip on each shot card in the storyboard; override any shot where the routing guessed wrong (a spectacle-worthy close-up, a cheap wide).
Watch the budget panel do the math per shot — this is exactly the cost-vs-impact decision a real producer makes.
The build
- Start the project below (Ironveil ships pre-configured: Trailer format, Pro coverage).
- In the storyboard, check the duration curve: long atmospheric opens, short violent ends. Trim durations yourself if the curve is flat — pacing is the edit.
- Stage everything. Trailers jump between spaces, so chained continuity matters less scene-to-scene, but each frame's composition is everything. Recompose until every still could be a poster.
- Generate, then work takes hardest on the first shot (the hook) and the last (the title beat).
The title-card beat
Your final shot should be a near-empty, high-drama composition — Ironveil's is a single ember in darkness. Two ways to finish it:
- Set the shot's Caption / CTA overlay to the title ("IRONVEIL — 2027") for the in-app preview and .srt.
- Or export the clips and drop your title in your editor — the composition already left space for it.
Music is half the trailer
In Export, generate the bed: "epic hybrid orchestral trailer music, braams, rising tension, huge percussion hits." Audition it under the timeline — scrub to your hardest cut and feel whether the track's build matches yours. Regenerate with a tweaked prompt until it does, then Assemble preview cut for the full mix.
Pro move: trailers cut to music in real editing. Get the assembled cut close in-app, then do the final ±0.3s nudges in your editor with the exported numbered clips and the music file.
Trailer checklist
- First shot works with the sound off
- No scene resolves; every beat asks a question
- Durations shrink act by act (check the timeline's clip widths)
- Wides rendered on the spectacle model; nothing premium wasted on inserts
- Final frame owns its silence — then the title
Next lesson: Narrated stories — voice, music, and the multitrack render.