Commissioning a Pitch Trailer: What to Settle Before Anyone Starts

A pitch trailer that disappoints almost never failed in the edit. It failed on the first page, in a brief that did not answer the questions that determine everything downstream. The good news is that page is free to change and the edit is not.

Six things. Settle them before anyone quotes, and the rest of the production becomes a technical problem rather than a negotiation.

One: who is in the room

Not a category. A specific kind of person with a specific job. A commissioning editor at a streamer, a financier at a market, a sales agent assessing pre sales potential, a talent agent deciding whether to pass a script to a client, a brand partner. These people want different things and are persuaded by different evidence.

A trailer built for a sales agent looks different from one built for a director you want to attach. Building for both usually means building for neither.

Two: the one thing it must prove

Written as a sentence, agreed by everyone who has approval, before design starts. If three people around the table would write three different sentences, the film has not been briefed yet, and no amount of production quality will resolve that later.

Three: whose film it is

Decide the authorship model explicitly. Are you directing with a studio producing, are you co directing, or is the studio directing?

This is a commercial question as much as a creative one. If part of your pitch is that you should direct the feature, then the trailer needs to demonstrate your direction, and a studio doing it entirely in their own voice actively undermines the case you are making. If you are attaching a director later, the opposite may be true and a strong studio voice is an asset.

Four: the date, and what it is attached to

There is a large difference between we would like it in the spring and it screens on the fourteenth. A real date changes the schedule, the sequencing, the contingency and the price. Give it early, and give the reason, because the reason often changes what the film should be.

Five: what you will be allowed to do with it

Settle this before production, because it can change what is safe to put on screen.

• Private pitch use only, or public release.
• Festival submission, which has its own declaration requirements that vary by festival and change from year to year.
• Paid media, which is a different rights position entirely.
• Whether any real person, likeness, voice, brand or piece of music appears, and on what basis.
• Territory and duration of any licence.

Six: what failure looks like

The question nobody asks and everybody should. If this film is finished, technically excellent, and the pitch goes nowhere, what would have gone wrong?

Working through that in advance usually exposes the real risk. Often it turns out the risk was never about the film at all: it was that the package is incomplete, or the market appetite for the genre is the actual doubt, or the decision maker was never going to be the person in the room. Those are worth discovering before you spend, not after.

What a good proposal comes back with

A point of view, not a menu. If a studio returns with three options at three prices and no recommendation, they have transferred the creative decision back to you and charged you for the privilege of making it.

You want a recommendation, the reasoning behind it, what they would cut if the budget were smaller, and what they would add first if it were larger. That last pair tells you what they think the film is actually made of.

The stages we work through are set out on the proof of concept page.

Settle six things on paper before anyone quotes: who is in the room, the single thing to prove, whose film it is, the real date and what it is attached to, what you are licensed to do with it, and what failure would look like.