A Hollywood film trailer portrays dramatic moments from the life of a famous British inventor, played by actor Domhnall Gleeson. Spanning the whole of his life and career we see him equip Ernest Shackleton (played by Dominic West) and his entire expedition to the South Pole, design protective clothing for young soldiers in the WW1 trenches, whilst glimpsing his homelife with wife Sienna Miller and a dangerous romantic interest with one of the first ever British female aviators (played by Lily James). Based on the true life story of this historic Briton, the pace and glamour of the production lets audiences glimpse the influence he had on exploration, war, and British society, leaving them hoping to see the full film.

This was a very different task than usual for an award-winning film director. Rather make a glamorous, star-studded biopic feature and then edit the best bits into a crowd-pleasing trailer, the challenge here was to condense that same level of effort, planning, energy and performance for a full feature (normally drawn from months of filming across multiple locations on a larger budget) into one week on one location filming ONLY the elements needed for a 3 min trailer. In advance, the director needed an acute sense of what would become the most powerful excerpts without the comfort of any other editing room choices later, the ability to make maximum creative use of a single location to best represent numerous decades, continents and weathers, and also to draw believable performances for the story’s most powerful scenes out of an A-List cast without the benefit of any context or development.