Directors are cutting the trailer before they lock the picture
Festival stills used to be an afterthought. Now the first public frame is planned while the edit is still open.
Farhan Qureshi · Mumbai ·
A Mumbai editor showed us a timeline where the trailer sequence sits above the feature cut of an eighteen-minute film. The director picks the public frame before she picks the final performance.
Festivals ask for stills, a logline, and sometimes a teaser at submission. Teams that wait until the grade lose the week that programmers are actually looking.
The practice has a risk. A trailer cut too early can sell a film the locked picture no longer is. The teams doing this well treat the teaser as a draft, then rebuild it from the locked cut in a day.
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