Back to the drawing board..... literally

Still my own worst enemy

After thinking I was happy with my sequence so far last night, the plane was to continue watching tutorials of after effects as well as picking up a few tricks for premiere. This wasn't the case. While going through a tutorial, it was mentioned that after effects got its name because after all the footage was edited, that is when you add the special effects. So with that in mind I went back to premiere to finish editing the footage in premiere so it was ready for after effects.

But as I was going through the footage I realised that I was only happy with about a third of it so I pretty much started again. So here is what I did, again......

Tweaking the first 18 seconds

So the first 20 seconds of the video were pretty much exactly what I wanted so far, and all that was left to do was tweak a few things. The first thing I had to do was to add a fade to a piece of audio so that another piece could play and it would seem like a transition of sorts. After searching under Audio Effects for a gradual fade, I had to settle for exponential fade under audio transitions. I didn't want to select this one as the fade was too quick but it was the closest I could get. All that was left for me to do was set the duration and position it correctly.

Editing the position of the fade

After that was done, all that was left was for me to speed up the duration of a clip I previously added to make it appear more fluid in the movement of the camera.

Increased the speed until I got my desired result

Once all that was done, it was a matter of selecting the clips again from the footage I shot.

Selecting the correct clips

When it came to selecting the right clips, I did things slightly differently. I selected the clips based on the audio. The reason behind it was because the first time I tried to place the audio over the video which did work to an extent but wasn't as good as I wanted it. So this time I decided to select the clips and base them around the audio which looked a lot better.

I trimmed the audio down to about 45 seconds because the whole track I selected was an hour long. Once I marked the in and out points of the audio, I dragged it down to the sequence just after the 18 second mark.

So the first thing I wanted was to showcase my logo at the start of the trailer, similar to what a lot of production companies do. So  I added the logo to the sequence and shortened it down to 2 seconds as any longer seemed a bit excessive. But I wanted to give the transition from the previous clip to the logo a professional look so I added a transition called Film Dissolve which gave it a nice transition slowly fading the previous clip while slowly revealing the logo clip. The one problem I had is that when the audio started there was a slight delay from when it actually started. So I shortened this in the clip. But I ran into another slight problem, the audio just started loud with no build up. So the way around this was to add another audio transition called Constant Power. This started the track softly and went to full volume.

The audio transition really helped the quality of the trailer

As you can see from the image above, I included another transition to go from the logo to the next clip in the sequence. Because of the short duration of the logo, I moved the majority of the transition to cover the clip . The clip itself I edited the speed of the clip and edited the size so that it would with all the other clips on the sequence.

Making a clip seem dramatic

The rest of the clips followed the same process of adding various transitions and editing the speed of the clip to give a slow motion effect or to speed them up so other clips could be added to the sequence.

There was one clip where I rose up from the ground and turned around looking. The part where I looked around happened a little too fast. So I played the clip to just before the point where I turned my head and moved forward a frame at a time until I got to my desired position. I then cut the clip in half and slowed down the clip and shortened it slightly. With the music playing, it gives a dramatic feel to it.

Creating the end

I had the clip to end the trailer on and added a fade to clack transition to give it a professional look. I also applied a fade to the audio as well but found it was too short. I selected the transition and opened the effect controls in the source window and extended the duration to match the transition of the video. But it still wasn't good enough. It didn't give the title of the movie and the last key bit I was missing was adding text to a clip. So I added a picture after the final clip and then when to create a dynamic link to After Effects. In after effects, I used adobe Bridge to browse the preset animations of text and selected one that seemed appropriate to the trailer called teleport. After changing the font, size and colour, I saved the project, closed after effects and moved it to the end of the sequence so that it appeared on top of the picture. I edited the duration so it matched the duration of the picture and then added a title that was 2 seconds long with the text "coming to DVD soon".

The end of the sequence is complete and so is the initial editing

The movie is very near complete at this stage. All that is left is to edit some clips in after effects, add some explosions with the use of chroma key, replace a background for a clip and then export it. Not too bad for two days work.