Trailer vs. Teaser vs. Clip
"Trailer" is really a whole family of formats, each with a different length, purpose, and moment in your campaign. Knowing which one you're cutting — and which ones your film actually needs — saves you from building the wrong thing. Here's the full toolkit and when to reach for each.
People use "trailer" as a catch-all, but in practice there's a family of promotional cutdowns, and each does a distinct job at a distinct moment. Cutting the wrong format for your goal is a classic indie misstep — building a two-and-a-half-minute epic when what your social campaign needed was a fifteen-second hook, or dropping a full plot-heavy trailer when a mysterious teaser would have built more buzz. The good news is that once you've done the deep work of finding your film's best material (which the rest of this course teaches), all of these formats are cutdowns and variations of the same core selects — so understanding the family lets you plan one campaign that feeds many pieces. Let me lay out the whole toolkit.
The trailer family
The formats you'll actually use, and what each is for:
- Teaser (15–60 sec). Early, mysterious, mood-first. Its job is to announce the film exists and create intrigue — often long before release. Light on plot, heavy on tone, image, and a single hook. Great for building anticipation.
- Full trailer (1:30–2:30). The main event. The complete pitch: tone, premise, stakes, and characters, built in the classic three-act structure. This is the one most viewers mean by "the trailer" and the centerpiece of your campaign.
- TV spot / short cut (15–30 sec). A punchy compression of the full trailer for ads and paid social. Fast, hooky, ends on a strong button and your title. You'll often cut several from the same material.
- Clip (30–90 sec). A single self-contained scene or moment from the film, shown more or less as-is. Different job from a trailer — it lets audiences sample the actual experience, good for social and press.
- Social cutdowns (6–30 sec, vertical). Platform-native micro-versions — vertical, captioned, hook in the first second. Increasingly where films are actually discovered. We'll cover these in the platforms chapter.
What your indie film actually needs
You do not need to make all of these, and trying to can scatter your energy. For most indie films, the priority is clear: cut one excellent full trailer first, because it's the workhorse that everything else derives from — your festival submissions, your website, your press, your paid ads all lean on it, and a strong TV spot and a batch of vertical social cutdowns fall out of it naturally once it exists. A teaser is worth making earlier if you're running a longer runway to release and want to build anticipation in stages, but if you only have time and energy for one piece, make it the full trailer and make it great. Match the format to the moment in your campaign: teasers early to plant the seed, the full trailer at the heart of the push, spots and social cutdowns to drive traffic once people are paying attention, and clips to give press and fans something to share. And always match the format to the platform where it'll live — a two-minute horizontal trailer that's perfect on YouTube is the wrong shape and length for a TikTok feed, so plan the family with distribution in mind. Think of it as one campaign with a hierarchy: the full trailer is the sun, and the teasers, spots, clips, and social cuts are the planets orbiting it, all made of the same material. Get the big one right and the rest is reshaping. With the formats clear, the next chapter opens up the full trailer itself — the anatomy and beats that every great one is built from.
On one release I made the rookie mistake of pouring everything into a single two-and-a-half-minute trailer and calling the marketing done. It played fine on our site — and died on social, where nobody watches a long horizontal video in the feed. The film that beat us to attention that month had cut the same story into a moody 30-second teaser, a punchy vertical hook, and the full trailer, each for its own home. Same amount of footage, a fraction more editing, and far more reach. Now I always plan the family up front — one campaign, many shapes.
Build your trailer in Recut — log your best selects, try different structures, and sync your cut to a music track so you can shape the whole trailer before you commit a single edit.