Storytelling Unit - 'Soft' Trailer

In today's lesson we was given a task to pair up and create a trailer for the short film, 'Soft' by Simon Ellis. I paired up with Helen and we decided that we wanted to create a serious and dramatic trailer.
Our brief was to create a 1 minute trailer, our lecturer gave us 4 hours to complete this task.

Helen and I watched through the film again to remind us on what happens in the story.
We discussed on what type of ending we wanted to have, i.e. how the title of the film would look, etc. While looking through different ideas, Helen came up with the idea to have a cricket bat picture next to the title at the end. The cricket bat is in the movie and is shown through different ways throughout the film. As I knew roughly how to use After Effects, I offered that maybe we could have the cricket bat to swing and hit the film title, 'Soft' and then change to 'Coming Soon.' Helen really liked this idea so we decided to go along with it.

We chose clips that we thought were key to telling the story about this film but also the most catching and interesting to us. When we completed this we put the clips in order to what we thought would make sense. After we thought we had finished it we went through it again and thought that this trailer didn't really tell a story so we decided to take out a couple of clips and rearrange them. I'm glad we looked through it again as I definitely think the trailer makes sense now.

All the class showed their trailers they created. When we showed ours Simon told us that next time we had to make sure we make the video 1 minute long exactly, as ours only lasted 58 seconds. He also said that at the start of the trailer have a blank page so that it gives the audience a second to get into watching the trailer. If me and Helen added the blank part at the beginning, our video would have been the full 1 minute. The last thing Simon mentioned was that one of the clips we showed (the dad getting hit in the face) was not necessary to add, as it gave a part of the story away. Luckily we will learn from our mistakes and will hit our brief exactly next time.

After watching this in class there were a few things I would have added and done a bit different. At the end when the bat is shown I would have liked to added sound effects on top of the audio, to make it pop more. Also I would have liked to change the titles shown at the beginning of the film to 'a film by Simon Ellis' and adding the Sundance film festival logo, as they seemed more relevant to add then, 'UK film council & Film 4 production'.