IMOVIE
My first impression with imovie was that it was complicated to use. There were too many ways to edit and I did not have experience on how to use them. But as we got along in using this software, we started learning how to use it and I ended up finding easy and simple to use. It has several ways to edit clips in terms of colours of the image and transitions effects. We could also add text into our trailer easily; we could even change the colour and the type of the font, and the movement of the text. I believe that imovie is easy to split/ clips or the music, and we could just drag each piece of clip or music into wherever we want them to be. However, it thought that to edit the music was a little difficult and it took me time to learn how to do it properly. Here we were editing the music:
ISSUES DURING THE EDITING PROCESS
The first issues we had during the editing process were that all of our first filming was not useful. We realized that just after we uploaded our filming in imovie and started looking at them in big screen. When we started deciding which clips we wanted to have and then editing them, they did not make sense. Some of them were useful, but we decided that we needed more scenes and shots. We also thought that we needed to be more specific with our storyline and make sure we follow it and also we had to make sure that we meet our shot list. Another problem we faced was that we wanted to use the “slow motion” feature for some of our scenes but it did not work so we just decided to leave that until the end and see if our teacher could help us in how to do it or if there were other ways to do it through different softwares. We also found it difficult to put the scenes in the right place, so we kept on changing them until we followed the storyline we wanted to show through our trailer. Furthermore, we realized that our trailer was too long so we had to cut down few seconds from most of every scene and this took us long. Lastly, we had issues when editing the music because the music that we imported was 5 minutes long and we only needed 1 minute and few seconds, so it took us long to get the parts that we wanted from the song, then to put them into the right scenes and at the same time they have to sound right all together. The trailer ended up being 1 minute with 44 seconds.
SHOTS TO INCLUDE AND EXCLUDE
We decided to choose the shots that had the best acting, the best shot and camera angle. These shots also had to have the right idea that we wanted to portray to the audience. The shots that we excluded were poor quality in terms of lighting, camera shot and angle, acting and also some of them had shaky movements.
GETTING THE AUDIENCE INTERESTED
We did not want to show who the killer was. Instead, we show the killer as “innocent” and least suspicious so the audience can see the twist at the end of the film. We also gave away information through the text between scenes such as “she meant every for her, but then everything changed and it would never be the same again”, this gives a sense of suspense and the audience would want to know what happened. We also created this suspense through filming a scene at the graveyard and also a scene of a fire, but we don’t show what exactly happened and who died. We also showed and include the girl who died on the film in our trailer, so the audience doesn’t know that she died until they watch the whole film and see the twist at the end.
We wanted to create a scene of a fire somehow in out trailer, but because this was a little hard for us to do, we decided to search for horror trailers in youtube to find a scene of a fire so then we could extract it and put it into our trailer.We found one in the trailer of “The Crazies”. It was short and quick because we did not want to show much to the audience so we don’t make it very obvious. You could find it in the following video in the minute 1:08.
CREATING A SENSE OF FEAR
To create fear, we filmed a scary shot of hands full of “blood” and we edited the colour of this scene by changing the colour of the image by making darker. We also found a song that created suspense and fear throughout the scenes. The text we included between some scenes had colour red which connotes horror and death. A scene on the grave yard we thought that was creepy and also most of the scenes were filmed during cloudy days. Another scene that we used to create fear on the trailer was when the main character was on the mirror and when she moved a bit to a side, we could see someone behind her on the reflection of the mirror. The transitions we used the most was “shade in” and “shade out” between each scene. We also used a transition effect called “dessintegrate” which looks like scene is burning and this represents the fire.
Here we decided to change the text from red to white because we realized that in existing horror trailers, in general, there is no use of red text. White is more legible and clear to read.
