A short film cut from what a project already has, made so a room feels the film before a frame of it is real. Director led, built for the greenlight.
A sizzle is a short film cut from material that already exists. It is not a trailer for a finished movie. It is proof that an unmade one deserves to exist.
The names move around. Feature financiers say proof of concept. Television says sizzle. Trailer houses say rip reel when the footage is borrowed. It is the same job every time: make the room feel the finished thing.
Every project in development has the same problem. The thing is real in your head and nowhere else. A script is a hundred pages of asking someone to imagine. A deck is a set of promises with nice fonts. Both ask the reader to do the work.
A sizzle does the work for them. At some point in it, a stranger stops imagining your film and starts remembering it. That shift is the entire product.
How long it runs is set by the room, not by a house style. Frontières at Cannes asks for two to five minutes of original footage before you can pitch. Outside those gates, it runs as long as it takes and not a second longer.
It is
The job is to make someone feel the finished film. Not to summarise the plot, and not to list what you intend to shoot.
It is
A scene you already shot, test footage, location scouts, stills, boards, sometimes phone video. Occasionally one day of new photography if there is a hole nothing else fills.
It is
A financier, a producer, a network or streamer, a market panel, a piece of talent you are trying to attach. Different rooms need different cuts. We ask who before we ask what.
It is not
A trailer sells a film that is finished to an audience that can buy a ticket. A sizzle sells a film that does not exist yet to a person who can pay for it to.
It is not
Clips in a row with a needle drop underneath is the thing people mean when they say sizzles feel cheap. They are right. That is not this.
It is not
If the underlying project has no story, no sizzle rescues it. We will tell you that on the call rather than take the money.
Three to six weeks, typically. Five steps, in this order, every time.
Step one
Four questions on a call. What is this raising money for. Who exactly has to say yes. What is the emotional core. And what scares you about pitching it. That last one is usually the most useful thing you will tell us.
Step two
We go through everything that exists. All of it, including the material you think is unusable, and especially the material you have already written off. It is the part of this job people find hardest to believe until they watch it happen.
Step three
One scene, one image, one line that carries the whole film. Find it and the structure builds itself around it. Miss it and no amount of pace covers the gap.
Step four
Structure, pace, sound design, music, colour. Built with the discipline of a finished trailer, because the room you are walking into has seen a thousand finished trailers and will judge yours against them whether that is fair or not.
Step five
Delivered in the formats that room actually needs. A file that plays off a laptop with no wifi. A link that does not ask for a password. A vertical cut if the conversation is going to happen on a phone.
Received. We read everything, and you will hear back.
Or write directly · firewoodstudio@gmail.com Firewood · New York