Post-Production

I edited our trailer using "Sony Vegas". Sony Vegas is a very advanced piece of editing software, but considered the basic of professional. It is a very good gateway programme to have all the best tools in such a simple form. I chose to use Sony Vegas as I have a lot of experience with it and it is very easy to use in terms of construction, such as organising clips and audio files on the timeline.

Timeline

Here is a small sample of what my timeline looked like after I finished editing our trailer. As you can see I used several different layers for overlay clips and audio. Not all layers are visible but you can see from the scroll bar on the right, that it extends quite far.

Aspect Ratio

In order to portray a cinematic effect, I decided to use the "letterbox" effect. this consisted of using the 2.35:1 ratio that is used for modern widescreen films. I found this from my research and applied the correct resolutions in order to obtain this effect. I ensured each clip was 1280 pixels wide and 545 pixels high, opposed to 720 pixels which would be full widescreen. This effect can be achieved in vegas by selecting the "Pan and Zoom" button on each individual clip and either manually typing in the resolutions or by dragging the transparent box that Sony Vegas provides, to select your margins.

Effects (Non-CCTV)

In order to achieve the cinematic look, I had to apply several differnet visual effects to each clip and alter these effects for each clip to make sure everything looks equal and fitted together. For the cinematic shots, that weren't CCTV, I used various VFX. These included "Black and White", "Brightness and Contrast", "Colour Corrector", and "Colour Curves".

The reason I used a very slight "black and white" filter is so that some of the colour would be drained from the shots, making it appear darker and more dramatic. As you can see from the images below, I have taken a picture of a flower field which is well lit and has a very "happy" tone to it. I then added a slight "Black and White" filter to it, and it automatically looks more dramatic.


      No-Filter                  

Filter

                                                                               

The reason i altered the "Brightness & Contrast" is to add a crisper touch to the video. By decreasing the brightness it gets rid of any unwanted highlights that appear and by slightly increasing the contrast, the image become more crisp and sharp, making the outcome that little bit more cinematic.

The colour corrector just adds the overall tone to the film. It is very slight but overall has a big effect and can change the entire atmosphere of a clip, if used properly.I had no initial plan of what tone was going to be conveyed via the colour correction process, therefore I just played about with the various settings until I found a result i was happy with. In order to obtain the best effect, you only want to add slight alterations on the colour, otherwise it will look over the top and lose it's original tone.

Colour curves are primarily used to emphasise the colours within an image/video. It can be used to change all colour channels or one specific colour. It is a very useful tool that can be used to enhance certain aspects of a clip. As a lot of our clips were of the same tone, I only had to edit the RGB channel which essentially altered the shadows and highlights, I changed it specifically for each clip to ensure they all looked as good as possible.

CCTV Shots

For the CCTV Shots, I used all of the same effects except I added a preset in Sony Vegas called "TV Simulator". This plug-in adds the whole monitor effect to the clip and has various settings that can be changed. The main seetings are the "vertical and line sync". By changing these you can make it look as if there is a bad reception, making the clip shake and become distorted. The other key setting is "Phosphorescence", this adds the blue tint to the video which gives the entire "CCTV Effect". Once I applied the effect, I needed to use a template to finish the effect. This is the detail around the frame, such as the name of the camera, the date etc. I made this in photoshop so that I could easily change the text, for each clip. I made a transparent image with the text boxes, so that I could just overlay each image with ease.

RGB Split

A key aspect of my trailer, I feel, was the "twitch" effect i applied in the CCTV clips. This is when the camera twitches and produces an outline of the image with different colours.

i.e.

In order to achieve this, I had to change the "Project Properties", which effects each individual clip. I had to change the "Stereoscopic 3D Mode" to "Red/Cyan". This means that when I edit each clip, the outlining colours that appear are red and cyan, as seen above in the example still frame.

In order to achieve the best twitch effect, I decided to use keyframes. This allows me to choose the intensity of the effect, how long it takes to peak and then return to zero. Keyframes are essentially the starting and ending points of any smooth transition. 

You can see the keyframes in the bottom left of each image, and as you can see in the preview window, when the cursor reaches the middle frame, I have adjusted the colours gradually, displaying the red and cyan outlines. This only happens for a slight second, enough to notice and appear effective.

Black Flashes

I didn't want to keep repeating the same effects throughout my trailer, so I considered using a stutter effect in which the camera flashes black for a very short time. I feel that it is a very effective technique and fits well within my tailer. Below is what it looks like...

As you can see, All i did was cut small pieces of the original clip and placed them next to plain black frames. It is a very simple technique and I feel it has the best visual effect.

Sound

In my opinion, the best aspect of our trailer is the sound. I collected various different sound samples and experimented with them to see what would fit best. For the narrative, I wanted to portray the tinny video camera sound quality, therefore I recorded the narrative on my iPhone, imported the track into a programme called "Ableton Live". Ableton is professional music production software that allowed me to apply multiple effects, in order to achieve the sound that I did. In terms of the music that we used, I had to re-edit alot of it to make sure it would fit with our clips. Luckily, the music we chose was very simple and mellow to start with. If you look at the image below, you can see the beats via the sound waves on the top track. I re-adjusted these so that they fitted with the transitions in our trailer.