The assignment: Take a modern movie trailer and make it look like it’s from the silent era.

In brainstorming for this I was thinking of what elements might feed into the juxtaposition of eras that this assignment prompts and thought something related to technology would be interesting to play with. This is the trailer for Blade Runner, and hopefully the look of the 80s trying to be futuristic will still get enough of that idea across.

I played around with this a little bit in iMovie, so I know how to remove the original sound and convert it to black and white. Playing a bit with the contrast and brightness levels helps a bit in making it look older, but I don’t think I’ll mess with that too much since it is already quite dark and shadowy. I would need to add some sort of scratchiness to it, maybe a little bit of a shaking to mimic old time projectors — Google tells me this is possible, but further investigation will be necessary. Another thing would be to play with the dialogue bits that are in the trailer, adding in shots of text silent era style.