We've been cutting the trailer for about two weeks now, and I've learned something slightly humbling: the parts of our demo I'm proudest of are almost impossible to film.
They're the felt bits. Timing, weight, the little half-second where your body reacts before your brain does. In the headset it's the whole point. On a flat rectangle, at 30 frames a second, with no stomach involved — it's just a thing moving. I've watched a clip of a moment I know is good and felt genuinely embarrassed for it. Not because the moment is bad. Because film is the wrong container.
So the job becomes translation, and none of us are translators. We're builders. We spent a year learning to make something feel a certain way and now we've got two minutes to make a stranger
believe it feels that way, using a medium that strips out the exact quality we were optimising for. It's a completely different craft and we're starting from zero at it, again, which is becoming a bit of a theme around here.
The other thing nobody warned me about: how much of trailer work is deciding what not to show. Every good bit we have is finite. Put it all in and there's nothing left to be surprised by later. Hold too much back and you've made two minutes of vague atmosphere that says nothing. We've had the same argument four times in different clothes — someone wants a moment in, someone wants it saved, and both of them are right, which is the worst kind of argument to be in.
And the whole thing is being cut from a build we've deliberately decided not to make prettier yet. That's the deal we made — no polish until there's money behind it — and I still think it's the right call. It's just a strange one to hold while you're staring at your own footage frame by frame, cataloguing everything you'd fix if you were allowed to spend the time. You get very familiar with the gap between what you've got and what you can see.
The small consolation is that we're no longer arguing about whether the thing is good. We settled that. Now we're arguing about how to explain it, which is a much better problem and, honestly, a sign of progress even when it doesn't feel like one.
Cut number six is due Thursday. Somebody hide the timeline from me until then.
— Thiago, learning to edit against his will
Posted by Thiago Moreira · September 8, 2026
← All news
