Making a Trailer - Experiment

We were given the task of trying to make a short trailer in 2 hours. We had to plan, film and edit in that time. We were not able to finish the task in the time, but did get a sense of how crucial the planning is and how difficult it is to make a complex narrative clear in the very short time allowed in a trailer. We have also learned that the planning of our trailer will be vital as in many ways it is much harder to construct than the opening sequence we made for our AS work. This is because the opening sequence involved continuity editing - this leaves the door open for a lot of technical and continuity errors, but is relatively simple to plan as it is fairly obvious what shot must come next. Trailer editing is very different and is like a complex jigsaw. There is no one way of putting shots together and changing the order / edit can change the interpretation and mood of the whole piece. It is therefore much harder to plan. On the upside, continuity will cause fewer problems and when mistakes are noticed, they might be easier to rectify. For example, we will be able to entirely replace one shot with another. This was impossible in the AS task because it would have affected continuity.

Plot Overview

We spent part of our planning time working out the narrative to a whole imaginary film. This is what we came up with:
After some kind of apocalyptic event involving a deadly disease, there are a small group of survivors. One of them, Oliver, turns out to be immune to the disease. He is therefore hunted by doctors, who want to keep him alive so that they can use his blood to treat other people and perhaps  find a cure, and more ruthless people who just want enough of his blood to survive themselves.

Here are our edited versions of the shots we managed to film in the time:

Katherine

 

 

Oliver

 

These are obviously very poor, and we were never likely to make a good product in the very short time we were given. However we have learned an awful lot from the experience. We now see that we made too many 'scenes' when we should have been going for individual shots, out of context, and relying on the editing together to give them meaning - we were too concerned about them having meaning in themselves. We also did not think enough about our audience and how they would be able to understand what they were seeing. One thing we have established is that through all our planning, we need to keep asking ourselves 'how will the audience know...?' We also have found out that the trailer edit is very complex. While we are intending to come up with a detailed storyboard of all our shots, we are conscious that we might play around with the order in the edit. This is acceptable because you often see different versions of trailers, suggesting that there is no one perfect order and that different trailer cuts achieve different aims.