How Kesleigh is Reinventing the Movie Trailer for a Generation with a 3-Second Attention Span
- Ruby Moley
- Nov 6, 2025
- 3 min read
Over the smell of buttered popcorn and faint dialogues from screening rooms, 16-year-old Kesleigh Dougherty managed the concessions of her local theater. In the lulls between showtimes, Dougherty watched trailers on loop on the lobby’s TVs.
She wanted to be involved with film for forever, not in the form of ringing up candy, but in the way Cameron Diaz portrayed a savvy film trailer editor in “The Holiday.” As a child, she transformed family camcorder footage into improvised adventures with in-camera edits.
Now, Dougherty is a trendy, gifted film editor, paving the future of the industry’s social media marketing with her short-form edits. She has worked on trailers for blockbuster films like “Suicide Squad” and “Scream VI.” Recently, she's cut for “I Know What You Did Last Summer” and even “The Corpse Bride” 4K special released on Sept. 23.
Dougherty lives in Dallas, Texas, with her husband and two kids, working remotely for Eclipse, an entertainment marketing company based in Los Angeles, within its digital and social media department. Dougherty serves as a role model not just to her field but to students at Southern Methodist University, where she teaches as an adjunct professor.
In traditional filmmaking, trailers follow requirements on runtime, structure, and pacing. On social platforms, these rules collapse. It is challenging, fleeting, but also where she finds her excitement, crafting moments in engaging ways.
“I believe that’s how people are seeing things today—we’re streaming everything, we're chronically online, which is good and bad,” said Dougherty. “It’s what I veer towards, fewer rules, more fun.”
And not following traditional rules was how Dougherty got herself into the business. At the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, Dougherty received her BFA in Filmmaking in Editing and Sound Design. She specialized in editing, engulfing herself in the world of post-production.
In her last semester of college, Dougherty stumbled upon an article about the Golden Trailer Awards. After researching the winners, she pressed send to over 100 emails just asking to chat.
What started as simple conversational meetups, scheduled from her only two responses, earned her two job offers just two weeks after receiving her diploma.
Once in LA, Dougherty lounged at the beach, took hot yoga classes, and ran into icons like B.J. Novak. But in reality, “making it” in LA was eight-, nine-, to 12-hour days. Every day was “giving a lot to get very little” in the cutthroat media industry, she said.
After the city became too expensive, Dougherty moved to Nashville, where she met her future husband. When his work brought him to Texas as SMU’s assistant rowing coach, Dougherty followed, where she continues to make innovative edits.
Dougherty’s career is very new, with the “boom” of social media as a serious media channel occurring only in the last five years. Her first big edit breached the new frontier six years ago, advertising the first episode of “Euphoria.” The edit, posted on YouTube, gained around 200,000 views.
What defines Dougherty’s edits is her ability to manipulate, which encapsulates her occupation of storytelling.
“When I first met her, what I noticed was she was so good at crafting moments and mining for these moments,” said Lesley Demetriades, a filmmaker and longtime collaborator of Dougherty. “I had her do… my directing reel, and she turned it into a story. I had never seen that before in directing reels.”
As for technique, Dougherty has it down. Unlike traditional trailers, short form follows a rule called the six-second rule; the amount of time you have to hook a viewer. But Dougherty has observed, from analytics and her personal experience with Gen Z, that six seconds has ticked down to three.
She cuts mini trailers before the trailers, called “bumpers,” to keep people from swiping. Attention spans are shrinking, clutter on TikTok is growing, so to have a 16-year-old user watch an entire 30-second edit, Dougherty feels successful.
Between the classroom or online, Dougherty has always held a keen understanding of Gen Z’s habits, giving her an advantage in the digital-first era.
“She’s always looking for trends, what she could do, how she could market ideas,” said Kyle McKinney, Dougherty’s creative director at Rebel AV. “On the Gen Z side, she [knew] what was popular ahead of time. “
In class, she prepares the next generation of editors with technical skills. Dougherty emphasizes building a skill set that will secure futures.
“I love to help, I love to inspire people, I love my kids. I think I’ve created for myself this cool little life that I’m really proud of,” she said.
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