The trailer is one of the most important forms of advertising for a movie before it comes out. It gives the audience a glimpse of the plot, characters in the film and creates a feeling that should leave audience members wanting more. Writing a trailer may be tricky, because you want to give enough information about the film to entice others to watch it, yet you don’t want to give too much away before the audience has a chance to see it. The purpose of a trailer is to hook viewers and encourage them to buy a movie ticket to see the rest of the film.
Watch the film. By knowing the plot and characters in a story, it will help you narrow down pieces of dialogue or scenes that you can use as sound or image bits while a trailer is playing.
Write down character dialogue that you want to use as thematic bits, or pieces you will want to have incorporated into the trailer. Come up with narrative dialogue to explain the overall theme of the movie to the audience over sound and images from the movie.
Organize your thoughts. MovieMaker suggests using the final scene of the trailer as a cliff-hanger. Everything in your entire movie trailer script should focus on this cliff-hanger.
Determine what you want to use to begin your trailer. If you want to use an image or some narrative dialogue, you must show the audience the subject of the movie. The beginning of your script should be an introduction to the overall film.
Fill the middle of the trailer script with narrative about what is going to happen, and then show various action or plot images that will build up toward the cliff-hanger.
Look at the theme of the movie to get inspiration about what to share with the audience during a trailer. You can also incorporate the characters' dialogue into the script that supports these themes.
