The thing that decides whether your sizzle is any good is not who cuts it. It is what you hand them. I have watched good material get a mediocre piece because the wrong things were sent, and thin material get a great one because the right things were.
This works whoever you hire, including if that is not me. Nothing here needs anyone's permission.
This is the whole article, really. Everything else is detail.
The instinct is to curate. You send the nice footage, the properly lit interview, the drone shot you paid for. You leave out the handheld stuff, the test you shot on your phone in a car park, the interview where the audio went wrong, the twenty minutes before the subject knew you had started.
The best thirty seconds in a sizzle is almost never the footage the director is proud of. It is usually something shot by accident, or before anyone was ready, or after everyone thought it was over. That is not a rule I invented to be contrarian. It is just what keeps happening. Polish reads as an ad. Accident reads as true, and true is the thing that moves money.
So do not curate. Curating is my job, and I cannot do it on material I never saw.
Before any of that, answer these. If you can answer them in a paragraph each, you have done more preparation than most people who commission this work.
Not the film. The next specific thing. A development grant, a market slot, a shoot in a particular month. "The film" is not an answer, it is a category.
A name if you have one, a role if you do not. A fund's reader is not a financier is not a festival panel is not an executive producer you are trying to attach. They want different things and the cut should be different. Almost nobody thinks about this and it is the highest-leverage question on the list.
One sentence. If it takes a paragraph the piece will not work yet, and that is worth finding out now rather than in week four.
This is the one people skip and it is usually the most useful thing you will tell me. The thing you are worried they will ask is almost always the thing the piece needs to answer in the first thirty seconds. Your fear is a very good map.
A sizzle is built from what exists, and what exists will not obey a script written in advance. Write one and you spend the whole edit forcing the material into a shape it was never going to take. Find the shape in the material instead. Then you will know what it is.
Sometimes there is a hole nothing fills and one day of photography is the answer. That is real, and occasionally it is exactly right. But it should be a conclusion you reach after looking at everything, not the plan you start with. Most projects already have the moment. It is just buried, and nobody has gone looking.
Put everything in one folder. Not a curated selection. Everything. Then answer question two: who exactly has to say yes.
Material plus audience. That is the whole brief, and with it almost any competent editor can make you something that works.