The Final Cut Arrange Window

As the title suggests, here is a screenshot of the arrange window in my Final Cut document.
I had too many regions to fit in one window, so I had to photoshop two pictures together. Below is the result:

As you can see the window is very busy, but it shows how my skills have developed and how I went from knowing literally nothing about Final Cut to being able to work with this many sounds and video regions.

While completing my coursework tasks this year I have learnt a lot about visual editing with the arrange window. Visual editing is when things you change can be watched as you change them, as opposed to having to export the product first. As my knowledge of visual editing and Final Cut in general grew, I could start to work with more and more clips of sound and video, hence the size of the arrange page above...

The Soundtrack

One of the other courses I take is music technology. Within this subject we use a piece of software called Logic Pro 9. It is a music editing software and it is how I made my soundtrack.
Most of the little sounds and ambient noises are loops from the loops library, but I made some of the music myself using my skills from this other subject. Below is a screen shot of the arrange window, showing all of the regions I created with sounds. I didn't use all of the sounds, but most of them have made an appearance in my teaser trailer:

Here it is...

The final teaser!
I won't babble on this time, here is the finished product:



Now here is where I babble...
You can probably see some major changes here. I have added a new shot, like I planned to do, which actually turned out really good. I desaturated and added distortion to this clip, the same as I did with the field clip with the character in the background.
The other major change is the wording of the inter-titles (again).
Because the last inter-title stood out the most, everyone who watched it thought that 'to survive' was the title of the film, when in fact the original idea was to have 'the last day' as the title.
I thought I would go with what my target audience said, but didn't think that 'to survive' was very good, so I changed the wording to make 'survival' the last inter-title, making that the title of the film.

One more shot?

Yes please.
I have an idea for another shot that will be played very quickly to help the pace of the teaser.
The shot that I have in mind is of the girl featured in my teaser being dragged across the floor again, but away from the camera down a hallway of sorts, into the darkness. I am taking a camera out for a week to do this shot, as I have other plans for the camera to do with the ancillary task... But I will explain more on that later on.

Second Draft of Teaser

Here is a second draft of my teaser trailer.

One of the major changes is that I have taken out the inter-title saying 'for Earth'. The reason for this is that from some of my feedback (and from some of my own opinion) I learnt that talking about Earth as a whole makes the film seem like an alien film or a different form of science fiction. I originally chose 'for Earth' because I couldn't think of anything else and it was the only thing that created a certain 'horror' impact. I then thought of humanity because it makes even more of an impact, but this time it's the right kind of impact.

I re-did the inter-titles on LiveType, so they now don't get cut when they scroll across. This has also now enabled me to cross over the words 'for' and 'humanity', giving a greater effect.
Here is the result:

A busy busy day...

Luckily, the school had a 'digging deeper day' today, which means five hours of media! (Woo!)
Within these five hours, the whole class had a sit down to show each other our rough teaser trailers.
Due to my hard working nature, I had an almost finished cut of my teaser.
Some of the comments I got included:

"There is a lot of areas in the teaser where it is just black and nothing is happening." - I could easily rectify this by closing the gaps between shots. It's not so much that there are gaps, it's more that the handles of shots sometimes go on for too long.

"There is a little bit too much footage after the last inter-title." - I could see where they were coming from from my research of teasers. Most teasers that do include inter-titles only have one or two more shots after the last inter-title, sometimes not any shots. I re-jumbled the order and put the last 'survive' inter-title in between the 'dark' shot and the 'blood' shot at the end, finishing with the 'blood' shot.


"The inter-titles sometimes get cut." - To change this, I did the inter-titles again in a program called 'LiveType'. This is a program specifically designed to make inter-titles or regular titles. It was actually a lot easier and it worked well.




These were the only major comments that I got, a minor point was just volume levels, which I planned to do after I knew I had the teaser pretty much finished.

Teaser Mark 01

This is a first draft of what my teaser trailer will look like.