How To Make A Trailer In 4 Easy Steps [Tips & Tricks]

Want to know how to make a trailer that’s really cool and simple all by yourself? Well, we’ve got that covered for you. In this blog, we’ll show you 4 easy steps on how to make a good trailer.

Now, trailers are not limited to just movies or films that you watch on the big screens. You could use them for a variety of purposes like documentaries, youtube channels, launching a product, promoting your business, or even to get your podcast going.

So, before you begin to make your trailer, remember that the whole point of a trailer is to give your audience a sneak peek of what’s in store for them. It has to create excitement and curiosity in them to want to know more about the film, product, show, podcast, or anything that you’re creating for them.

Just to keep this read interesting, we’ve listed a few fun facts for you about movie trailers.

Here are some cool interesting things we learned about trailers from Movienco. Did you know?

• Trailers were usually played after the film because the word ‘trail’ means to follow behind or after. Hence the name ‘trailer’. But it was later decided to play them at the beginning as people usually left the cinema without watching the trailers.
• The first-ever trailer was created in the year 1913 in New York for a promotional video of a Broadway musical.
• The world’s longest film had a trailer that lasted for 7 hours and the trailer was released in 2016.

How long should trailers be?

For feature films, you should try to limit the length of your trailer to a good 2 minutes and 30 seconds because you don’t want to give away too much. So it’s always best to keep your trailers short and sweet even if they’re for a product or a business.

In this article, we’ll be covering multiple topics regarding trailers. So feel free to navigate to any section that interests you.

How to Make a Trailer in 4 Easy Steps

Different Types of Trailers to Explore

Important Tips to Keep in Mind While Making a Trailer

Now, let’s jump straight into the simple steps you can follow to make your very own trailer.

4 basic steps to make a good trailer

If you follow these basic steps, you can learn how to make a movie trailer or even how to make a book trailer all by yourself in no time. So, let’s look at what they are.

1.Collect Videos and Upload them

Before you go ahead, you have to keep your video clips or images that you would like to use in your trailer ready.

These clips should be the highlights of your movie but at the same time should not be spoilers. They should be important snippets from your movie so that the audience gets curious to want to watch your movie.

Once that’s ready, you can import them into Typito to begin creating your trailer.

2.Edit Your Videos

You can edit your videos by trimming and cutting them because there might be a few unwanted portions.

You can then add transitions between the clips to make your video flow nice and smooth from one clip to another.

To make your clips more interesting, you can change their speed by either reducing it to give it a nice slo-mo effect or you could add intensity by making the clip 10x faster.

3.Add Cool Effects to your Trailer

Apart from editing your trailer video, you could enhance it by adding a lot of cool elements. You have the option to choose from a whole bunch of text templates that could be used as titles, captions, or even subtitles for your trailer.

Another way to add an emotional element to your trailer is by using music. Because it helps you set the tone of your trailer and you can choose a suitable genre from our collection of royalty-free tracks.

And finally, you can add a logo of your brand or production house at the end of your trailer to create brand recognition among the audience.

4.Download your HD trailer and share

Once you finish editing your trailer and adding cool effects to it, you can export and download your HD trailer video.

In the next section, we’ll explain in detail how to make a trailer video by carrying out these steps all by yourself.

How to make a good trailer in 4 easy steps

First things first, make sure you’ve logged into Typito by going to Typito.com (or if you don’t have an account you can sign up for free).

Once you’re in, click on New Project on the top right corner.

If you’re looking at how to make a trailer for Youtube, then choose the youtube video format for your trailer as most of them are usually uploaded on Youtube. You can however choose any video format that works best for you.

And with that, you can begin to create a trailer by following the rest of the steps below.

Step 1: Upload your videos

Once you’ve decided on a particular format for your trailer, hover over it and click Create.

It will direct you to a page where you have to choose your media. You can either choose to upload media from your computer or you can use the videos and images under stock media.

You can upload your own videos or use stock media

After choosing your video clips and images, click on Start Editing.

Note: You can always import more videos into your project even after entering the dashboard where you’ll be editing your videos.

Step 2: Edit your trailer - Trim, cut,  & add effects.

To trim your video

Select the video that you need to trim. Once you do that, the clip gets highlighted and you will find two handles on either end of the clip.

To trim the video, simply drag the handle to trim out the unwanted portion.

Click and drag the handle to trim your video

To cut your video

Place the pointer on the portion of the video that you want to cut and click it. Then, you will find a scissor icon to cut your video.

Click on the scissor icon and your video gets cut at that portion.

Once your video is cut, click on the unwanted portion and press the delete icon.

Click on the scissor icon to cut the video and the delete icon to delete the clip

To add transitions between clips

Zoom into the timeline by sliding the small bar below the timeline from minus to plus and you will find the transition icon between the video clips.

Zoom into it by sliding the bar from minus to plus and click the transition icon

Click on the transition icon and choose a transition for the video clip.

Example of a fade to black transition

There is a Fade to black transition as well as a Cross dissolve and you can try out both of them to see what works well for your video.

To change the speed of the video

Click on the Media tab on the left pane.

Then select the video clip you would like to change the speed of.

On the left side, you will find an option to adjust the speed of your video. You can simply drag the cursor to the left to reduce the speed or slide it to the right to increase the speed.

You also have the option to customize your video speed

Step 3: Add cool effects to your video trailer

To add a title to your trailer

You can use Typito’s cool Title templates to highlight the key points of your trailer as well as enhance the visual element of your trailer. You can use these title templates as intros to start off your trailer on a high note.

To add a title, choose the Text tab on the left pane. You can either simply add text to your video or you can click on Title and choose from the list of cool title templates for your trailer video.

To add the title template to your video, simply click on the template and you can drag it to any position in the video.

You can then play around with the font style, color, and size according to your convenience.

Choose a suitable text template by simply clicking on it

Now, there are different ways you can add text to your trailer. If you want to add them as text captions, we’ve got you covered as we have multiple caption templates too to choose from to make your trailer look much more visually appealing.

If you would like to add subtitles to your trailer that has a voiceover, you can check out How to add subtitles in 3 easy steps.

To add music to your trailer

Click on the Audio tab from the left pane. You’ll then find a collection of different royalty-free tracks categorized into different genres.

Choose a suitable music track for your trailer by clicking the Add button near the track.

You can then select the best segment of the track that suits your project.

You can trim the best portion for your trailer from the music track

You can also make adjustments to the volume of the music track and the background sounds present in your video

To add a logo

Almost every trailer that we watch always ends with the name of the production house if it’s for a movie. If it’s a promo video for a product, they always bring their brand logo into the picture to establish their identity and create an impression.

If you have a branded logo, you can add them using our exciting logo templates.

To add a logo, click on the Image tab on the left pane and upload your brand logo from your device. You can add suitable text by clicking on the Text tab.

You can also add your logo using our exciting templates which you will find under the Text tab. Click on ‘more’ to view more logo templates

You can then play around with the font color, style, and size to your convenience.

Position the logo and use a suitable font color and style to make them visible and clear

Step 4: Export your trailer

Once you finish making all the different edits to your trailer, you can finally export your trailer video. You can do so by clicking the nice little yellow button on the right corner that says Export.

Choose Yes once you’re ready to begin exporting your trailer

It might take a few minutes for your video to export. After that, you can preview your video and download it to upload them to various social media platforms.

And with that, you have yourself a cool trailer that’s really simple to create in just 4 steps.

Now that you know the basic steps to make a trailer, let’s look at some of the different kinds of trailers that are used in different fields.

Different kinds of trailers to Explore

Like we said before, trailers aren’t used just for films. They can be made for a variety of different purposes and we’ve listed down a few of them for you to explore.

1. Movie Trailers

These are the most common trailers because they are very popular and people watch them all the time. They are trailers made for feature films that run for about 2 hours or more. Here’s a cool example of a feature film trailer that you can check out.