The film trailer is a work of art. Sometimes. Maybe often. Not really always. For every trailer that is genuinely better than the movie it’s trailing, there are clunkers. I don’t want to suggest that we should write trailer moments into our scripts but I wish we could edit the footage.

I think about this a lot because I do video editing and it feels to me like writing. It’s very much the final edit and the bits of my brain that I use at Final Cut Pro X are the same ones I use when writing.

Which is partly why I just find trailers so fascinating. And this comes up today because of Star Wars. I’m not a big fan but I remember the shivery anticipation when the trailer started for The Phantom Menace. How did that work out again? It’s also interesting because originally that trailer went out online on some crappy PC-based postage stamp thing and it was Apple’s QuickTime engineers who lobbied to do it properly. When they did and it worked out so well, that was really the start for high quality trailers.

Well. That’s high as in the video quality. Have a look at this collection of the trailers for all the Star Wars movies, including the new one. I’m surprised to say I think The Phantom Menace looks the best. I’m appalled to say how ferociously bad most of these are.

Watch the lot on The Verge