Concept slateIn production
The Midnight Cartographer
FantasyInk-dark maps that redraw themselves, a drowned city at dusk, and a hard cut to silence before the title card.
The slate
Six genres. Six different films.
A fantasy trailer should not sound like a thriller. Here's how we think about look, pace and score genre by genre — and where your book would sit.
Concept slateIn production
Static Between Stars
Science FictionCold blues, a signal from an empty sector, and silence used as the loudest beat in the cut.
Concept slateIn production
What the River Kept
Mystery & ThrillerWarm rot and river light — a small town, an old secret, and a reveal timed to the final drum.
Concept slateIn production
Salt and Second Chances
RomanceGolden hour, a harbour town, and two people arriving at the same pier eleven years apart.
Concept slateIn production
The Quiet Understory
Literary FictionGreen shade and long takes — a family, a piece of land, and the sentence nobody will say out loud.
Concept slateIn production
Brasswork Boys
Historical FictionLamplight, ledger ink and a rising brass score under a city on the edge of changing forever.
These are concept slates, not finished films. Our first author trailers are in production now, and we'd rather say so than dress up stock footage. Send us your brief and you could be one of the launch titles on this page.
What a treatment actually looks like.
Before anything is built you get this — the whole trailer on paper, so changes are a conversation rather than a re-edit. Here's a real one, abridged.
Treatment · The Midnight Cartographer · Fantasy · target 45s
Logline. Every map she draws comes true. Something is drawing back.
Music. Orchestral dark fantasy with a music-box motif — a haunted waltz. Slow build from 60 to 110 BPM, celesta and low strings rising to full percussion, then a hard cut to silence before the title card.
Voice-over — low female voice, unhurried, like someone reading a confession by candlelight:
"Every map I have ever drawn… has come true. So I drew a door. I should never have drawn the door. Now something is drawing its way back to me."
Shot list
- 7s · hook. Slow push-in on a lantern-lit desk strewn with hand-drawn maps, ink lines crawling and redrawing themselves across the parchment. 35mm anamorphic, warm candlelight against deep blue shadow.
- 6s · world. Aerial drift over a drowned city at dusk, canals where streets should be, lantern boats leaving ripples of gold. Text card at 4s: "EVERY MAP SHE DRAWS COMES TRUE".
- 7s · inciting image. A woman with ink-stained fingers draws a doorway by candlelight — and as the last line closes, the drawn door begins to glow and exhale cold mist.
- 6s · turn. An empty night street where black ink seeps upward through the cobblestones, forming map lines that race along the walls. Text card at 3.5s: "SOMETHING IS DRAWING BACK".
- 6s · stakes. The woman running along a canal bridge with a lantern, clutching a rolled map, mist parting around her.
- 7s · climax tease. She stands where the sea pours into white blankness like an unfinished drawing, sketch lines hanging in the void. Text card at 4.5s: "THIS FALL, THE MAP ENDS".
Title card
The Midnight Cartographer · A. R. Vale — "Some doors should never be drawn." Available this fall wherever books are sold.
What goes into a cut.
Four things decide whether a trailer feels like a film or a slideshow.
Pace before pictures
We build the rhythm first — where the cuts land, where the silence sits — then hang visuals on it. That's the difference readers feel but can't name.
Your words, sparingly
Three or four lines of text, maximum. A trailer raises a question; the book answers it. Over-explaining is the most common book-trailer mistake.
Score that fits the shelf
Properly licensed music chosen for your genre's conventions, because readers have deep expectations about what a thriller sounds like.
A last frame that converts
Cover art, title, author name and where to buy — held long enough to read and screenshot. Beautiful trailers that forget this don't sell books.
Want your book on this page?
Send your blurb and we'll come back with a treatment inside a working day.