A Trailer Editor’s Biggest Challenges

Every career has different challenges to overcome, but what can you expect to encounter as a trailer editor?

FEP’s Lead Trainer Chris MacDonald sat down with Zack Arnold, host of the ‘Optimize Yourself’ Podcast, to discuss challenges he faced during his Hollywood editing career in an interview, which you can watch above.

The full interview is worth your time, but here are some key takeaways.

Don’t Get Too Attached

If you’ve spent weeks or even months cutting a trailer, it’s easy to be too focused on your own ideas of what clips, characters, and stories you want to show. Even now, Chris can still fall into this trap:

You’re convinced, ‘No, no, no, I’ve seen the movie three times – I know better than anybody. This is the story we need to tell, and this is the trailer.’ And you can always tell the less experienced editors from the more experienced ones by their inability to let go of those ideas.

Cutting a trailer is rarely a solo project. When working in the industry, you’ll need to make creative decisions based on input from other team members and stakeholders, so you can’t be too precious about sticking to your exact vision.

Test Audience Feedback

Receiving feedback is a vital tool for improving your edit, but not all feedback is equal. Screening trailers to test audiences is a common practice among many Hollywood studios. However, often the trailer doesn’t resonate with the audience due to contextual reasons, rather than creative choices, as Chris explains:

It just means that it didn’t work in that location of that trailer with that music under their circumstances, or the person that said they didn’t like it was just having a bad day…everybody knows their trailers are just going to be ripped apart.

It’s likely that you’ll be expected to make changes based on this feedback, so working them into the edit without negatively impacting the final product can be a real challenge.

The Cutting Room Floor

In the film industry, it’s expected that some of your work will end up being unused. However, sometimes it’s not even the final version of the trailer that gets shown.

Chris relates an experience where his team worked on 3 different trailers for the same film, about 37 versions in total. However, management didn’t like the final versions:

Because they didn’t like the current one (they said) ‘Well, show me some of the others.’ Version two, we locked, as-is. Version two with no changes.

Chris got paid for his work on the other versions, but that wasn’t the point. His team spent a year on a two-minute trailer, so throwing most of that work away must have been difficult to handle.

Nobody wants this to happen to them, but it is sometimes part of the process within the industry. If you can keep a level head when decisions like these don’t go your way, it’ll allow you to have a sustained career in Hollywood.

Is It Worth It?

Despite all the problems and challenges, is the career worth getting into? Chris summarized it this way:

For me, there is no better film school for being a storyteller and learning how to solve problems than by being a trailer editor.

Trailer editing has many challenges and obstacles to overcome, but it rewards you with a unique skillset that you’d be hard pressed to find anywhere else.

Wrap Up

If you’d like to pursue a career in editing trailers or anything else, check out our training page, where you can find free and premium training courses to match your goals.