BuildOut "Trailer"

The BuildOut trailer, published as a director's cut by Rick Wayne. It runs 1:28.

A documentary trailer is a distinct piece of authorship rather than a promotional byproduct. It has to establish a world, introduce a stake and generate enough friction to make someone want the longer thing, all without the resolution that gives the feature its shape. It is built from material shot for another purpose, which means the assembly is closer to composition than to excerpting. What it withholds matters as much as what it shows.

This is a form that rewards a director who cuts. Wayne has said he has been editing as long as he has been directing, and that when he calls a shot he can already see the finished file. On nonfiction that instinct shows up earlier than the edit: knowing while the camera is running which moment is a trailer moment and which is a chapter is what determines whether the material exists at all when the assembly starts.

April 2020 places this at the front of a period when the entire production industry stopped, and it sits in Wayne's Los Angeles run just before the move to New York and the founding of Underscore Films there. The documentary work from this stretch, including artAffect Denver in February 2020 and the Close Talker trailer with Michael Strahan in September 2019, is where his nonfiction voice is most visible without a brand attached to it.

That voice does not stay in the documentary work. He has described his approach as genuinely curious about real people and real moments, and that curiosity is what he carries into the commercial films: the Graco spot cast with real parents rather than actors, the NUK testimonial, the S-Gel profile films. The categories are separated on this site for navigation. In the work they are one practice.