Oppenheimer Trailer: Professional Trailer Editor Reacts

Hey Editors and Filmmakers, it’s Chris, lead trainer at Film Editing Pro. Today, we’re going to be looking at the trailer for Christopher Nolan’s ‘Oppenheimer’. Specifically, we’ll look at customizing music to work with a trailer, using sound design to accent key moments, and how graphic cards can be used for effect.

A Trailer’s Identity

There’s a motif that’s used throughout the trailer – the clips of explosions and fission reactions, obviously relating to the nuclear bomb featured in the movie.

I’ve imported the trailer into Premiere, and used the scene edit detection to show where the various cuts are. Every yellow clip below shows where these are peppered back in, creating a cool stylistic element throughout the trailer. It’s neat when you have something that gives an identity to your trailer, usually the by-product of a movie with a strong identity.

This movie has a lot of great material to work with (shot beautifully by Christopher Nolan), which makes the job of a trailer editor infinitely easier. When you have the luxury of working with absolutely gorgeous footage, the coverage of every angle needed on every character, and wide shots to pull out and get scope, it enhances the editing process.

Graphics Cards

It’s interesting to note that this particular trailer has very little graphics cards (or copy). The first card is “From Christopher Nolan,” which is a hugely important call-out. For a Christopher Nolan or Steven Spielberg movie, you’ll likely mention that in your trailer, often with a full-screen graphic.

Building To a Climax

The timeline is also a good way to visualize pacing. The edits are more tightly spaced towards the end, marking an increased pace and the music elevating in intensity. It’s pretty common for a trailer to pick up the pace you get to the end, especially when something’s building to an impactful climax like this is.

Let’s listen again to the big music transition in this trailer, which you can do by playing the audio clip below. The percussion starts heavily on the Christopher Nolan card, which is a massive indication to the audience that energy is rising and building to a climax.

How to Accent Key Moments

Towards the end of the audio clip, you can hear 4 percussion beats. When you’ve got little accents in the music like that, it’s probably a cue designed for trailer editors. Music libraries are very good at understanding what trailer editors need for cutting now, so cues like this are inserted to make it easy to cut to.

This trailer has used three beats of the cue to create cool shot changes. However, often the music will lack a bit of ‘oomph’ on these beats, so a trick you can use is to accent the beats with additional hits. Have a look at the example below:

To increase the impact of the cue, I’ve added some additional hits. I placed a marker where the beats were in the original score, and then aligned an additional hit with each one. You have to be tasteful with how you employ this, to make sure the sounds you layer feel organic to the music cue you’re working with.

Wrap Up

Overall, it’s a really cool trailer. Some people say there’s nothing good on TV or in theatres, but I beg to differ. There are more cool things than ever, and more people are getting opportunities to produce them. Christopher Nolan is well-established of course, but there’s so much good stuff out there.

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