Trailer Editing Walkthrough

For this project Del decided to use Adobe After Effects to edit and piece our trailer together. Del chose to upgrade to this program rather than using my original program serif movie plus to become more precise with colour sound and transitions.  Before piecing together any of the footage Del decided to work backwards beginning with the title sequence which included the title following with a shot of action and the coming soon screen with the credits.

 The title was created using a bold red text in a ‘Darlin’ font. This font had an uneven, distressed presentation to it, along with the bold red text used had been perfect in portraying the conventions of the Horror genre. Del chose to use a black background to contrast with the red colouring in all titles, and chose to add a code on the top left to give it the handheld camera effect that is seen in the trailer. After Del applied a grain/noise effect to reinforce the handheld camera effect along with a glitch/twitch effect to make the titles have an uneasy disturbed effect.

Between the title of the film and the coming soon title, Del added a sequence of the protagonist being terrified being reassured by their friend and the friend later being attacked by the antagonist. We chose to add a grain effect once again to consistently have the handheld camera effect, the purpose of this sequence being added in the end was to contradict the Todorov’s theory eliminating the new equilibrium and continuing the trailer with a constant disequilibrium narrative. This creates the intention of leaving the audience confused and interested, and also becomes unexpected as the trailer appears to be coming to an end but has a continuation of bad encounters.

The advantage of using this software is that Del is also able to add and adjust the colour tones and contrast with ease. We took all raw cuts and before piecing anything together I chose to apply the colour correction filter to each shot that Del was going to use, applying dark tones and contrasts to make the genre of horror more apparent for the audience. Del also added a green/yellow colour on some shots to make the characters and locations appear to be more creepy and uneasy.

After applying the effects Del started joining shots together, after looking and researching the way trailers are put together, Del was able to understand how the moments of calm moods and high energy fluctuate from the beginning to the end. To make these moments of fluctuating moods Del had to rely on the sounds we used, this became easy to do with this program as Del was able to layer, crop and alter the volume and pitch of the sound to the specific moments with precision.

Overall, editing this trailers first cut was hard because of the time that had to be put into consideration with where sounds and cuts with start and end. However, with more practice it became easier to understand to use, we used an old grainy effect through the majority of it to make it appear to be more creepy and scary linking with the conventions of the genre of horror. This has all become easy from the change of software from what we have both  used in AS,