A trailer is not a short film.
It is a sequence.

The theatrical convention is around two minutes and thirty seconds, and most studio trailers land between two minutes and two thirty. Online, shorter almost always wins: ninety seconds is a comfortable full trailer, thirty seconds is the standard spot, and fifteen to twenty seconds is the vertical social cut. Teasers usually run sixty to ninety seconds and sometimes far less. The honest rule is that length is downstream of how many money shots you actually have. If you have three, a two minute trailer will feel padded no matter how well you cut it.

A teaser sells that the thing exists. A trailer sells what it is. A teaser usually runs under ninety seconds, withholds the plot almost entirely, leans on tone, a single image, and a date, and often appears many months out. A full trailer takes on an obligation the teaser does not: it has to establish a world, a protagonist, and a stake clearly enough that a stranger knows what they would be buying. That is why the setup section exists in a trailer and barely exists in a teaser, and why teasers can get away with being pure atmosphere.

No, and for trailers it matters less than for any other kind of board. Most trailer shots already exist as footage, so instead of drawing you grab frames from a YouTube or Vimeo cut of your own film and pin them onto the cards. For a proof-of-concept or pitch trailer where the shots have not been filmed, a rough pen-tool sketch or a reference still from another film communicates the intent perfectly well. The value of the board is the order and the rhythm, not the rendering, and a beautifully drawn trailer in the wrong order is still the wrong trailer.

The workhorse convention is three movements. First, a cold open hook of three to five seconds that states the genre and buys attention, followed by a setup that compresses the world, the protagonist, and the stake. Second, a turn, almost always on a music drop, where the trailer stops introducing and starts selling and the cutting pace visibly changes. Third, an escalating montage of short shots cut to the track, broken by title cards and the logo block, ending on a button or stinger. Lay those parts out as one row and the failures are easy to spot.

No. The hard rule of trailer cutting is that you do not spend the third act. Almost every trailer people complain about spoiling the film did the same thing: it reached into the climax for its biggest images because the second act did not have any. If your escalation only works with third-act footage, the real problem is that your money shots are all at the end, and the fix is finding tension in setup material rather than raiding the finale. Mark third-act shots on the board so you can see at a glance how much you are spending.

Pick the track first, because the track is the structure. Lay the shot cards out as a row and mark the music events above them: the entry, the first stab, the drop, any breakdown, and the silence before the final hit. Then place shots against those marks rather than against plot logic. Your biggest image belongs on the drop, not two shots after it. Title cards belong in the quiet. This is the reason trailer boards are laid out horizontally with the beat running across them: the alignment is the whole craft.

Yes, and it is one of the strongest uses of the format. A proof-of-concept or pitch trailer is often how an unmade film gets financed, and storyboarding it forces you to decide which images actually sell the project. Sketch the cards you cannot fill, pull reference frames from films with the tone you are chasing, and mark clearly which shots exist and which do not. The finished board then works twice, first as the pitch and second as the shoot plan for the day you go and film the missing shots.

No. A shot list is an inventory organised for production efficiency, usually grouped by location or setup so a crew can shoot it in a sensible order. A trailer storyboard is a sequence organised for an audience, where the order is the entire point and cannot be rearranged for convenience. In practice you want both: the board decides what the trailer is, and a pull list tells the assistant editor which timecodes to hand you. Storyflow can hold both on the same canvas so they never drift apart.

No, and it should not. The trailer is cut in an NLE, where the frame-accurate timing, the audio work, the sound design, and the finish actually happen. Storyflow is where you decide what the trailer is before you spend a week on the timeline: which shots, in what order, against which music beats, with what withheld. Editors typically build the board, get the sequence approved by the director or the client, export it as a PDF, and keep it open on a second monitor while they cut in Premiere, Resolve, or Avid.

Not during early access. Storyflow is paid-only right now, with plans starting at $9.99 a month, and a Free plan for solo use launches before the end of 2026. Anyone a paid member invites to a board joins free today, so a director, a producer, or an assistant editor can join a trailer board without paying. If you need a free option this minute, a physical wall of printed frames still works, and it is genuinely how a lot of trailer houses learned to see sequence in the first place.

Boords is genuinely better if what you need is a numbered, client-facing panel document with a formal approval round and comment history on each version. That is a real workflow and it owns it. Storyflow is built around the thing trailers actually turn on, which is sequence and rhythm: an infinite canvas where the whole cut is visible at once, cards you drag to test a new order, grabbed frames from existing YouTube and Vimeo footage, and the music beat marked across the row. Pick by whether your bottleneck is approval or arrangement.