LO4: Evaluation (D2)

The White Room Trailer Evaluation.

Below I have attempted to explain our final product based on the original idea we had as a team. I have also showed using the software which we used how we have arrived at this conclusion.


1) Crosscutting sequence between Christopher Bates and Arron preparing to go out.

- Why did we include this?

The key part of both the first half of the trailer for our film and the start of the film itself was the idea of the protagonist and antagonist being contrasted to each other through the process of them getting ready to leave their homes. I personally had this idea based on the opening of Alan Moore's famous comic book series "V for Vendetta" and its film adaptation in which a similar process is used to introduce the narrative's two main characters. The sequence of shots we took for this part are included until the nine second mark (excluding the shot of Wayne's dialogue) where the second caption is shown. We decided that these shots would make the audience question the characters motivations as that several of them feature more suspicious props such as used bullet casings and a large knife.

- How did we achieve our desired effect?

In creating these shots we had to make sure that we could clearly distinguish the two characters from each other even in the shots where they were not included. In order to do this we made sure that the two characters homes would be lit in different ways. For example we used a polarizing lens on the cameras when filming some of the shots in the house of our antagonist Aarons house so that the shots would look much different to those in the home of Chris. As well as this we also applied some visual effects to the opening shot of Chris's face. This can be seen below.

2) Ticking clock sound effect over the trailer's shots

- Why did we include this?

This was one of the ideas which was also a pastiche from another trailer. In this case it was Christopher Nolan's 2017 film "Dunkirk." In this trailer the idea of using a ticking sound helped to give the trailer a sense of pace and meant that the viewer could anticipate the change of shots so that they felt more comfortable viewing it. We decided that we should use the same technique In our trailer as that it helps to convey the idea of time running out (in the case of our film this being until Christopher is kidnaped)

- How did we achieve or desired effect?

The process of creating this effect in the trailer was to be a complex one. It involved finding the right sound effect online and then using adobe premiere to speed up the clock ticking nearer the end of the trailer (this would escalate the tension)

3) Title shot

Why did we include this? 
When creating the trailer we decided that we wanted a dark final shot as that it would fit the themes and tone of the product which we were advertising. This shot would fit the conventional dark title that thriller films tend to have.


How did we achieve the desired effect?
The title shot at the end of the trailer Was made on photoshop by creating the text on a black background then deleting the background layer and cutting away the interior of the white lettering which I had used. This worked as that premiere supports transparent images. This meant that when I placed the image (which I had prepared in the same size of the frames of the trailer) over the final scenes of the trailer it appeared that the shots were beneath the lettering of the title. 

This was my initial sketch of this shot created for planning.

This is the final shot which was featured I'm the trailer. 

4) Slider shots.

Why did we include this?
The idea of using a slider shot came t me while watching the film "Bronson" which includes one near the end. The use of this shot adds to the tension of the scene which it is shown in. In this scene the title character is waiting for the door to broken down by the police. I decided that using slider shots and several were prepared in both Jacob and matts houses when we were filming. Some of these were used in the final film such as the ones on the window ledges of both houses and under the table at Cafe Creme however we decided to omit several which can be seen in my footage log of underneath Jacobs door.
I felt that this shot added to the tension of the final piece in a great way.

How did we create this effect?
I created this effect by positioning a camera slider on a tripod and making user that it was on a 180 degree angle with the floor and on the same level as the windowsill. The positioning of the windowsill was very important as tat I would need to transition between the two shots and are it look like a professional transition. Belo I have inserted an image with me setting up this camera setup for use in Matts house.

5) chosen dialogue 

Why did we include this?
The idea of having dialogue in our trailer was a contested idea within the group as that some of us (Me included) thought that too much dialogue would give away the ending of our film which would spoil the narrative and mean that people would be less likely to watch it based on our trailer. However, when we presented a version of the trailer which contained no dialogue the feedback stated that we should include some in order to give the viewer some more outlook on the story so that they knew what tone the trailer was trying to convey.
In the end the final version of our trailer does include some dialogue but far less than in earlier drafts as that as a group we decided to reach as compromise.
As for selecting the correct dialogue we decided that we should defiantly go with a line which would make the audience feel intimidated which s why we have used the character of Wayne asking Aaron "Do you know when the hit will take place?"

How did we achieve our desired effect?
There were several issues that we encountered when filming our dialogue scenes. The main issue being that most of our audio featured a loud hissing noise which had to be edited out. I did this in adobe audition. After this we had to cut the whole scene down to just the piece of dialogue which we wanted to use. This was done in adobe premiere.



Strengths of the final promo:

I feel that the way our trailer is paced well based on the other trailers which I have studied for the LO1 section of this blog. The main idea which we gained inspiration from was the use of the ticking clock in order to pace the trailer for Nolan's "Dunkirk". This idea we used and I feel we have utilised well.
I also feel that while we have matched our production to the storyboards we created for the film we have adapted our camera work while filming in order to create shots which are of a more professional nature. Through this I feel that our final trailer is of a higher quality than if we had simply followed all of our production plans exactly.

Improvements: 

There are several things that we were tasked with fixing in order to make the trailer in order to make a final version which would satisfy our client.

- "Do you know when the hit will take place" - The line has too much echo.

- Pace - Too slow last 15 seconds, needs to be faster both visuals and clock ticking.


In response to this feedback we decided that it would be of use to us to create one more version of our trailer which I have inserted below. I feel that this final version definitively addresses this feeback by tackling the issues presented.

There are several changes in this version of the white room's trailer. The first of these is that the ticking noise, I feel, has been made to sound far more professional. We have changed it by making sure that the ambient sound surrounding each tick is always there and never cut which was creating a skipping sound before. As well as this I feel that the issue of Wayne's echo has been dealt with as best as it possibly can be. 

Conclusion:
In conclusion I feel like my team has created a product which fits the codes and conventions of a movie trailer as well as the guidelines we laid out with our initial ideas. We have done this using a range of professional hardware and software as to ensure the high quality of final piece.

LO4: Final promo (Uploaded by Jacob, made by all) (P6)

LO4: Feedback (Frazer) (M3)

Gaining feedback: 

An important part of the creation of any media product is the gaining of feedback for the products adaption. For this reason I ,after the creation of our first draft of our trailer, decided to create a survey that would gauge people's response and help us to make a product that would more accurately suit the taste of our target audience.
Below I have left links to both the youtube video trailer of our trailer as well as the survey monkey.

Me (far right) and my team present the trailer to the class.

The trailer we presented is below: 

As well as showing the class the trailer we also sent everyone a survey using the website Survey monkey. The responses to this survey are below. 

The amincomplaint for our trailer was in the fact that the narrative was not made clear to the viewer however I believe that this is ctually a good thing as that having the trailer be non- linear makes a veiwer want to resolve the enigma shown them from the promo. This mans that the trailer being non linear and the viewer not being able to understand the full narrative through the use of the piece makes it a more effective product for its intended purpose, that being to convince an audience to pay for the final product.

After evaluating this feedback we decided that also wanted to gain feedback from our client who told us that the line of dialogue where Wayne states that "Do you know when the hit will take place?" had too much echo on it and that needsdto increase the pace.
Another piece of verbal feedback we gained stated that the ticking noise sounded poor because of the way it skipped between each individual tick.
Below is the finalversion of our trailer in which we have addressed these pieces of feedback.

LO4: Audio levels (Frazer And Jacob) (M3, P6)

LO4: Audio levels

Frazer

When creating The White Room we did not consider recording the audio at a later date so that we could edit it in later and have it sound more professional. This lead to us to have to edit the audio a large amount when creating the trailer.
The largest problem we encountered was a lingering hissing noise which persisted all the Way through the cafe scene which is meant to be dialogue heavy and rather quiet. To fix this problem I used Adobe audition. I have shown how I did below. We needed to remove this sound as that its presence had a negative impact on the professional nature of the product which we were trying to create.

This is the audio which I imported into Adobe Auditon. 

This is the effects menu. From here i went to to Noise Reduction/ restoration and then to "Hiss reduction"  

This is how i succssesfully removed the hissing noise from the cafe sequance. i had to be careful not to adjust the line to far otherwise it could make the audio sound distorted. (below i have included an image of the tool before i have used it

When this was done Me and Jacob did the hiss reduction for all of the audio we created for the film. We found this made the final product appear far more professional and therefore more ready for our audience to see.

The fact that the audios not hissing or echoing helps to reach the codes and conventions of a trailer that would also be made for a professional product as that these would not be in a trailer for a film that would be produced by a large studio.As wells this the ticking noise which is the other major audio feature of our trailer is already an established idea in the thriller genre thanks to the Dunkirk trailer which have annualised earlier in this suit and have stated that we were inspired by during the making of the white room.




Jacob

The main task when editing the audio for the trailer was removing background noise and hissing from the majority of the clips. To do this I selected the audio and used the noise/hiss reduction tool. I then altered the amount of noise reduction so the unwanted background noises was removed and the dialogue was kept intact. We did this to make our film sound more professional.

The other main task when editing the audio for the trailer was syncing up the ticking noise in our backing track with the transitions. To do this we made sure the gap between the ticks was the same length as each segment of footage (starting of at 1 second getting increasingly faster).

LO4: Footage log (Frazer) (P6)

LO4: Offline edit ( Frazer and Matt) (P5)

LO4: Drafts (Frazer) (P6)

Trailer draft one:

This first draft of the trailer was to use as a guide for the team to follow when working on aspects of the rest of the trailer so that they could understand the tone and pacing of the trailer that we were trying to create as a team. When asking others for feedback on this version the main complaint was that the trailer was far to linear and therefore gave too much away about the film and it's narrative (which while being hinted at should not be revealed in its entirety as that doing so would mean that the audience no longer has any investment into decoding narrative enigmas.)

Another large issue is that the frame size was not large enough to fit a YouTube video. As well as this this version of the trailer features none of the clips we took of the actual kidnapping scene which is paramount to the basis of the film. This is because at the time of its creation we had not yet filmed this final scene and will therefore add it in subsequent edits.

Trailer draft two:

This second edit doesn't add much to the trailer beyond removing some excess sound and improving the issue of the frame size being too small. This is the trailer that we presented for feedback and therefore the final version addresses the main issues addressed by the audience during that session.

Trailer draft three:

This is the final draft of our trailer and the one that would be shown to an audience. In order to make it more suitable to them we made the plot a bit more clear and also added some lines of dialogue as that that is what we were asked to do when we requested feedback. We feel that this is by far the best version of the trailer that we have created.

  

LO4: Evidence of editing. (Jacob and Frazer) (M3, P6)

The main aim of the trailer was to build suspense using quick transitions and intense bits of footage. I believe the way I edited the trailer helped create suspense and a feeling of uncertainty as to what will happen to the characters. This will make people want to watch the whole film to find out what happens which ultimately means that the trailer has achieved its purpose.



One of the main aspects of editing in the trailer was syncing up the footage with the ticking noise audio. Each clip needed to be exactly 1 second long and matched up with the ticking noise (the ticks were 1 second apart and the transition between clips needed to take place on each "tick"). Matching the ticking with the shots allowed the trailer to be more like the one we had taken inspiration form (that being Dunkirk) as well as that it would allow us to create the same sense of pace that is apparent in most trailers for thriller films. I used the razor tool to do this as that it allowed me to time each shot and make each exactly a second long. I feel like the use of this effect has helped us to create an overall sense of immersion as that our film is more professional.

Another important aspect of editing the trailer was cropping some of the clips. In the trailer, we wanted to have close-ups of each character and to do this we had to crop some of our existing footage. This helped us introduce each character into the storyline, which is one of the main conventions of a film trailer. The cropped close-up shots also helped add to the overall feeling of suspense by making the space that the characters occupy smaller. This gives the viewer a sense of the tense, claustrophobic nature of the narrative which we are trying to advertise. We cropped the shots by going to effects > Video effects > Transform > Crop and then adjusted the options to make the shot as small as we wanted it.

Arguably the most important aspect of the trailer was altering the colours of the shots. Altering colours and applying filters is extremely important in creating meaning in an audio-visual product as certain colours have different connotations. For example in this shot, we wanted to reinforce the negative stereotypes about the kidnapper so we altered the colour of the shot to make the blues stronger and the reds weaker. This gave a slight blue, cold tint to it which helps reinforce the fact that the shot is showing the antagonist. This is something that can be seen in many dark, thriller films in order to create a dark atmosphere. I did this by using the "Colour correction" under effects. Changing the shot to make it more blue connotes the hostile, cold and antagonistic nature of Aaron's character.

This screenshot shows me adding Frazer's titles used in the trailer, which were added at the very end to enclose the title of the film. I decided to use a cut-out style title is I thought the drastic change in background colour would make the audience take note whilst still allowing them to see what was happening in the shot behind. Another reason for using such a title was to demonstrate my editing ability as it is not a commonly used title. As well as this having such a dark title was quite in keeping with the dark themes of the trailer which we had created.
Frazer
It was also my job to create a title for the trailer. I did this on adobe photoshop by creating a file where the text was white and the background (which I created) was black. I then deleted the background layer and made the white text transparent so that the final PNG file which I had created was a black rectangle with the name of the film cut out of it. This logo reflect4ded well the dark themes of the trailer which we were trying to create. This was not the only version of the logo which I had created. Several unused drafts are available below:

Kidnapping scene.

Our short film aims to build tension towards the kidnapping of our protagonist Chris Bates. The final scene is to be very climactic and therefore will feature in the trailer for a brief moment. We wanted to make the shot look like it was being viewed from over the shoulder of Aaron (our kidnapper.)

However after filming the scene we found that it was too shaky to be legitimately watchable. Therefore I endeavoured to reduce the amount that the camera would shake with adobe after effects.
Getting rid of the shake in this shot would allow for us to have a more professional and easy to understand final trailer as that it would be difficult to understand what was happening in this scene if it were 

Firstly I opened after effects and imported the clip which I wanted to edit.

This is how After effects looks when initially opened..

Here I have imported the clip which needed the anti shake effect added to it in order to look of a professional quality. In order to do this I used the Warp stabiliser VFX tool 

This is a screenshot of the After effects programme running. After it was completed I transferred it to Jacob so that it can be used in the final promo. 

I also used premiere in order to create the graphics for our trailer. This was very easy as that there is a tool available on premiere specifically to do this.




It is essential for production companies to include their names in trailers. This can be seen in the screenshot below for the film "12 Feet Deep"

We decided that for our film we didn't want to include too much colour in these scenes due to our dark themes but as can be seen above we used premiere in order to create a production company title. I feel that this helped us to more accurately capture the codes and conventions of a trailer.

Another thing that I feel we have done well in our trailer is deciding on dialogue (as well as removing dialogue in places where we don't want it. Ther reason we did this is that we found that most of the trailers for other films within our chosen genre do not use much dialogue unless it is either establishing a character of a key plot point. We decided we wanted to include this as a feature in our trailer as that we wanted to include the same ticking sound effect that I had studied for "Dunkirk" and an over abundance of dialogue would likely take away from that. In order to achieve this we used the razor tool in premiere and cut out the piece of dialogue that we wanted to use. Then we deleted the audio from the surrounding clips by separating the audio from the visual feeds and simply clicking delete on the audio. Making sure that we were consistent with this approach allowed us to include what we felt were the most impactful lines of dialogue such as "Do you know when the hit will take place?" and I feel that this makes the piece seem far more like a real trailer for a thriller film than it would have if we hadn't done it. 

LO3 : Planning matching production (Josh and Frazer) (P6)

Planning matching production:

This post is evidence that our planning match the final product. The storyboard is the main piece of planning that demonstrates that the appearance of the trailer. 

The scenes below are both in the storyboard. The top one is a short clip of Wayne talking to Aaron. We decide that this was important to put in there as it shows that they are "friends", as there is also a shot of Andrew and Christopher. This immediately shows the characters, who's side each character is on. It fits with the conventions of a Thriller as there is very often two sides in a Thriller film/trailer. 

This is a generic shot of Christopher opening the door to his house. This shot just adds to the flow of the trailer and works well with the audio of the ticking sound. There are a lot of quick jump shots and this is just an example of one of them. Below is the shot in premier as well as the storyboard shot. We needed some shots to set up the trailer and fit in with the ticking noise. This was an example of one that also created suspense and made the audience curious of who the hand belongs to.

We ended the trailer with the title of our short film "The White Room". This is a convention of nearly every trailer, not just a Thriller film. It was done basically so everyone knows what the film is called and it was on at the end so it is the last thing that people see before the trailer ends. 

There is also an interesting foreshadowing shot where people see the balaclava in the draw but not who it belongs to. This will intrigue the audience as they will want to know who the balaclava belongs to. This links to the theme of a thriller trailer as they often create suspense and leave the audience wondering. Although the shot type isn't exactly the same it is still based off of our original planned shot, only using a slider to make it more aesthetic to watch for the audience.

LO3: Following codes and conventions (Jacob, Josh and Frazer) (D2)

One of the main conventions of a film trailer is the build up of suspense. In our trailer we achieve this mainly through the use of a ticking noise which gradually increases in tempo. The use of quick transitions also adds to the feeling of suspense.

Another convention of a film trailer is having a bold recognisable title, often shown at the end of the trailer. We have followed this convention by overlaying a cutout of our title (in bold) over a slider shot from our film footage; we added this at the very end of the trailer so it is the last thing the viewer sees which will help them remeber the name of the film.

It is common for film trailers to introduce the main character of the film in the trailer. We have done this by including dramatic close-ups of each character with a line of dialogue from the main characters so the audience can get a feel for what they might be like without giving too much away.

One of the more forrgotten about conventions of a film trailer is its run time. The average run time for a film trailer is around 30 seconds; this is so that the trailer can give enough detail about the film without giving too much away or the audience losing interest. We have followed this convention by making our trailer just over 30 seconds long.

A convention that relates to the genre of our film in particular (action/thriller) is having the action in the trailer interupted by titles at a number of intervals. We have followed this convention by adding titles of the related production companies associated with our film in between action shots at appropriate times so the continuety of the trailer is not affected.