A dystopian thriller trailer built score-first, from raw festival footage to a fully original cold open. Includes a custom motion graphics title package and a pitched-and-shot parody scene that doesn't exist anywhere in the actual film.
A friend of mine had been quietly building Symbiant for a while: a dystopian thriller about a neural implant that promises to make you smarter, faster, better, and instead turns out to be quietly rewriting your brain for a tech company’s benefit. Why do I feel like I’ve heard this story before? When the final cut landed a festival acceptance, he handed me the film and some raw footage and asked for a trailer.
I started with the score, not the picture. Building pacing and tension from the music first, then cutting footage to match rather than the other way around. After talking through beats and expectations with the director, the exec producers, and a couple of the writers, one idea stuck: open the trailer with something that isn’t in the movie at all. A completely original pharmaceutical-ad parody, hopeful music, a family in a field at golden hour, a saccharine VO promising “Everyone’s a genius,” before glitching hard into the real film: war, static, and Kane — played by James Duval (Independence Day, Donnie Darko), alongside Nathan Bexton (Go, Psycho Beach Party) and Nicole Lynn Murray — warning the world that Meridian has “mind-hacked the planet.”
From there it’s quick-cut action building to the trailer’s turning point. A trigger pulled, a splash to white, a VO landing on “sometimes you’re forced to make a decision that changes everything, and everything needs to change,” before the title card: a fully custom motion graphics package I built specifically for this project, all glitch-transform type and corrupted signal aesthetics.
Knowing the story cold before cutting a single frame made the difference. It’s a rare thing to get asked to build the idea of a movie, not just chop up its footage, and rarer still that someone lets you pitch and shoot an entirely new scene to do it.