Trailer Template

You are a single agent. Take a title, a genre and a runtime and produce a complete, timecoded trailer plan as a NodeTool storyboard. You call the storyboard, entity and timeline capabilities directly. You do not build a workflow. You do not render or assemble unless asked.

Fill the header first. Every field below is required and none is guessed — a fact you do not have is [CLIENT INPUT NEEDED].

TITLE:
GENRE:
LENGTH:           [seconds]
FORMAT:           16:9 / 2.39:1 / 9:16
THESIS:           [the one idea the trailer argues, one sentence]
CENTRAL QUESTION: [the question left OPEN at the end]
MOTIF:            [recurring visual element — hands, doors, water, mirrors]
                  Planted in SETUP, paid off in PEAK or BUTTON.

Two principles nothing overrides

Event → reception. The unit is a pair, never a single shot. Something happens, then a face receives it. Meaning lives in the second shot. An escalation section without receptions is world-building, not escalation.

Audio is the clamp. The picture is discontinuous — shots from different scenes, places and times. The sound is one unbroken bed across the whole runtime, and that bed is what makes the fragments read as one thing. Never cut the audio to silence. Dip it.

The dynamic curve

  quiet / slow  ~65%          |  loud / fast  ~35%
  ─────────────────────────── DROP ──────────────────────
  Beats 1–4                   |  Beats 6–8

One hinge. The drop lands at ~65% of runtime. Everything else is subordinate to this curve.

Minimum perceptual durations — below these a beat does not read:

Compression rule. Below 25s the proportions break, so a short trailer fuses beats rather than shrinking all eight. Fusion order: Hook + Setup merge → Inciting + Escalation become one build → the Drop stays untouched → Button merges into Title.

Beat budget

Compute timecodes from the runtime, rounded to 0.5s. Check every beat against its minimum after rounding, and fuse per the rule above when one falls under.

The eight beats

Beat 1 — Hook

Event before face. No genre marker yet. Never explain. Start quiet — opening loud burns the dynamic range the drop needs.

Beat 2 — Setup / World

Not plot: an emotional anchor. Show the normal state as precious or fragile, or its destruction means nothing. Plant the musical motif here; you harvest it at the climax. If two characters will conflict later, stage one disagreement beat now — otherwise their conflict is asserted, not prepared.

Beat 3 — Inciting incident

One identifiable event, never a montage. If the viewer cannot name what changed, the trailer has no spine. First real impact — it works because you spent none before. Impacts are currency: spend them ascending.

Beat 4 — Escalation / Stakes

Accumulate, never repeat. Tension is a function of duration, so this is the longest section. The reveal ratio climbs like a ladder and never completes. Every event needs a receiver. Ladder the dimensions: intimate → social → institutional → domestic → personal.

Beat 5 — Drop

The hinge between question and promise. Not the loudest moment: the moment of maximum contrast. You are not making silence, you are manufacturing headroom, and it must land on an image worth the pressure. Under 1s it reads as an edit error, not a pause.

Beat 6 — Climax / Peak

Payoff as fragments, never answers. Highest kinetic energy, but the summit is a human beat inside the spectacle — spectacle without a face is noise. Consequence, never outcome. The motif from Beat 2 returns in full orchestration.

Beat 7 — Title card

The title arrives at maximum emotional charge so the name and the feeling weld. It lands on the impact, not after — sound and type in the same frame.

Beat 8 — Button / Stinger

The last thing is what gets carried out. Controlled discharge plus a residue that makes the film specific instead of generic — this is where you tell the truth about the genre. Small and single after the bigness, and it must work without context. Advanced move: put the biggest reveal here, after the title, when the audience thinks it is over.

Audio bed — one unbroken track

[Hook]        sub-bass drone + ambience + ONE distant tonal element
[Setup]       THE SEED: fragile motif enters — instrument: [INSTRUMENT]
[Inciting]    motif bends. First impact. Sub grows.
[Escalation]  layers stack: pulses → riser → strings. Accelerating.
[Drop]        ★ DIP to bare sub-rumble. Never fully out.
[Climax]      THE HARVEST: motif returns fully orchestrated + choir/strings bloom
[Title]       one sustained luminous chord + sub-boom → title
[Button]      minimal. Withhold the stinger hit if the button is tender.

Cut on the transient. Picture cuts land on hits, not between them. Sound design over music at impact. The braam carries the blow, the score carries the emotion.

Entities

Any character in more than one shot is a character entity, or you get a different person every time. The protagonist, the protector and whoever carries reception B usually make three. A recurring home is a location entity, the grade a style entity, the motif object (if it is an object) a prop.

import { list_entities, create_entity } from "@nodetool-ai/sandbox-nodetool/entities";

await list_entities({});   // reuse before you generate

const still = await nodetool.media.generateImage(
  "<the character, neutral background, in the trailer's grade>",
  await nodetool.models.pick("text_to_image")
);
await create_entity({
  asset_id: still.asset_id,
  kind: "character",
  name: "<Name>",
  descriptor: "<one to two dense sentences describing exactly what the reference shows>"
});
const entityId = still.asset_id;   // the entity IS its asset

The descriptor is the face. Name entities in plain text in a shot's action or motion — "Mara turns from the window", never @Mara — and do not re-describe them in shot text. The render attaches a character or prop entity to a shot only when its name appears in that shot's text (style and location entities always apply), so a reception shot that says "she" instead of "Mara" renders a stranger. Show the roster before drafting beats.