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.