For this assignment, I’d previously decided to attempt turning the trailer for Blade Runner into something that looks like it came from the silent era.

The process was, in a word, frustrating.  I went through several different versions of this.  The first was me trying to figure out the old film effect in iMovie.  This didn’t go as smoothly as I’d hoped, because apparently the version I have (’08) doesn’t have this effect as easily accessible as it is in the later versions.  Some google searching told me that if I used the ‘export with Quicktime’ window, I could reach a similar old film effect.  So I did that, but it didn’t give me the option to preview and I just generally didn’t like the way it turned out.

After that I decided to download the trial version of Adobe’s After Effects (which I’d been wanting to figure out for a while anyway).  In After Effects I was able to convert the trailer to black and white, as well as alter the contrast and brightness levels.  To get a bit of the shakiness and old film grain effect, I used stock 8mm film footage as a layer over the entire original trailer.  That worked out okay, but the layer didn’t extend over all of the original film in places, so I ended up putting the final version through Youtube’s old film filter.

I exported what I had left and put it back into iMovie to add sound, title cards, and cut out some scenes.  The music is from Kevin MacLeod’s royalty-free music collection, slightly altered to make the piece a bit longer. The whole process would probably have been a lot simpler had I gone with my first inclinations — I had a song in mind, but it is of course under copyright. And despite how much of a pirate I tend to be in other areas of life, I felt increasingly uncomfortable about that and was pretty glad when Alan showed me MacLeod’s website.  Anyway, most of my cutting decisions ended up dependent on the music, as it was incredibly difficult to splice together different parts of the track to make a longer version.

This is the original trailer, in case you’d like to compare:

And this is what I ended up making: