I spent more time on this than I thought I would've and ended up getting a lot of thoughts to put together oh boy
Listen up, @monotone_ink! This, but all of it.
Before even watching a trailer..
In reference to my earlier comment..
I tried to put together my thoughts on why I wasn't that interested in watching trailers and the simplest answer was.. if it's not Webtoons presenting it, would I even find it?? Even then, would a trailer reaaally be that necessary for a comic, especially if I can read it for free? Not only can I go find it myself and start reading immediately to see if I like it or not, the trailer's a whole different medium! Latching on to an animation with music and voice acting for something I'd have to just read anyways almost feels like a step backwards. That's the sad truth of why these get little attention, I think.
But if you still wanna be masochistic and make a trailer anyways, let's go! I have way more to say!
What's popular???
Webtoons! Romance! Schools! And people doing normal people things! If you're going for Tapas, go BL. Done, move on to the next part of my text wall.
Ok, but for real, I think that if you boil down the process immensely, your potential reach and your genre are what's gonna sell it the most. This is the most evident with the Webtoon trailers, as they had by far the most popular trailers. Of the ones that did well in gaining views, they favored romance and slice of life comics which as we all know.. that's the most popular stuff on the platform. And school settings, because a huge part of the Webtoons audience is teens. You'd be lucky to get 50 views if you present a trailer yourself.
Obviously though, you're going for something different and it sounds like you'd wanna make the trailer anyways lol so on to the next one~
Far as animation goes..
I hesitate to call Webtoon trailers animated.. Rather than going frame by frame and animating like that, it seems more like they take a single image and crop everything relevant out and manipulate it to give it motion as if it were animated. These are glorified motion comics. Minor stuff might be actually animated like hair and facial animations, but that's as far as it usually goes. I actually don't like this type of animation for the most part as everything looks stiff to me no matter how fast they move 'em. But if this is what you're going for, I think motion comics use this style the most, so you might wanna look into tutorials for those.
Here's a few I found:
Anyways, it looks like the GIF you animated is in a low frame rate of.. 6 or 8 frames per second? But the animations between the butterfly's shadow and Jinia aren't completely in sync so it makes it a little harder to tell. I think it's good that you're approaching this with a lower frame rate, you can considerably lower the amount of work you'd have to do with just that alone. At the expense of making it less smooth with a lack of frames, you're killing yourself less! That's a win!
Now, I dunno if you're gonna be animating any action scenes from the comic or if you're just going to use the comic pages themselves for to show that off, if at all. The former would certainly be a good move for a trailer, but the latter would be more representative of the comic (the medium that you're actually trying to promote), so.. that's up to you. But if you're going to be animating it, I'd say to look into animation tutorials and looking up short films. I follow this one animator on YouTube, Howard Wimshurst, and he's got a great channel for talking about animation, analyzing, the creative process, the struggles behind it.
One of his short films, a playlist with a 3-part behind the scenes of the animation (the first 3 videos there).
About putting together the video for a trailer, and some thoughts about audio.
In essence, a trailer's also a way to tell a story. You don't gotta tell the whole plot, just enough to make things interesting. You already storyboarding for this is a great step forward, I don't think I need to get further into it. You mention wanting to go artsy and cryptic, but it'd help me know where you got the inspiration from to go this direction before I can say more about it.
Aside from that, I'd say that the editing gives it that identity that you'd wanna give it. Whether it's music or voice acting, the video takes greater precedent over the audio, and I say that because I found myself doing something while looking up trailers. The music was obnoxious for some of them, so I muted the video. I found that for some trailers that improved the experience. So, then I started muting the trailers before the video even started to see if it sold me on the visuals alone. As a test in the future, maybe mute your trailer to see if it can still convey the same feeling you wanna present. If you can do that, I'd say that adding the appropriate audio will do wonders on top of that.
Few tutorials I found again.
One other thing I'd also like to mention is the length of the trailer. It really depends on whether or not you can deliver everything that you're trying to say with it, but I find that that quicker trailers are more effective. Aim for about a minute, maybe less than that. It's a trailer, but if anything, that's your first and also your last potential chance to show someone what your comic is all about. Leave 'em wanting more.
Notable webcomic trailers for me
Now, this is strictly about webcomics but I'd say that manga trailers like the ones for My Hero Academia, The Promised Neverland, or Tokyo Ghoul: Re are pretty good and concise.
unOrdinary on Webtoons (how I found out about webcomics as a whole)
Your Letter on Webtoons (fully animated and voiced)
Ghost Teller on Webtoons (5 min. long trailer, fully animated and voiced in Indonesian)
Blink on Tapas
Mode II on Tapas
Fox Fires on Webtoon (posted by creator, rather than being hosted by Webtoons)
Saya on Webtoons (posted by creator, rather than being hosted by Webtoons)
Solo Leveling Manhwa
TREECLIMBERS on ERCcOMICS
Max Order on ERCcOMICS
The One That Got Away on Tapas and Webtoon
Hopefully everything I've presented here helps you in some way, dude! And uhh.. if you need music, you can always hit me up anytime, it'd be cool to contribute somehow in helping you put your comic out there~