This assignment was one of the ones that I selected to start my pre-production on.  Return to the Silent Era.  Our assignment is to take a trailer and make it look and feel old by applying effects both in the visual and audio department.  After watching Silent Star Wars, I decided to go in a little bit of a different approach.  The great thing about Silent Star Wars was it felt funny.  I didn’t want to go with funny.  I wanted to go with serious.  I wanted to go with a darker feel.  So I did.  I felt this really captured the essence of fall/halloween/cold.  I didn’t want to spend time creating something that lifted people up.  Given the piece that I worked with, I felt it needed a bit more of a damp feeling to it.

I’ve always loved mashing up audio and video, so I felt like this was a great starting point for the week.  I can definitely see why this one is a 5 star assignment though.  It really does take some time to get everything together, get everything made, and then produce something that is of quality.  I realize that the assignment says a 3-5 minute movie trailer, I really felt like this one captured everything that I wanted it to capture.  I especially didn’t want to spend time with something that was really long.  Once you watch my piece, you’ll understand why this length is perfect.

Finding the right song to go with the video was actually quite easy.  Once I figured out which trailer I wanted to use, I immediately went to my iTunes and found the song Dead Island by Giles Lamb.  It’s just a perfect song for the trailer.  After creating the mix and watching it, I really felt like what I had produced captured more of the elements of the movie than the real trailer did.  If you watch the Zombieland trailer, you’ll notice the humor and silliness that it evokes.  When you watch what I created, you get an entirely different feel.  I think that was the overall purpose of the assignment.  When you change something even just in the slightest way, it creates something entirely different.  If I had chosen a song that was a little bit more chipper, it would have made people smile when they watch it.  I don’t believe that I ever smiled watching it, other than marveling over what I had created.

For the actual production of the piece, I downloaded the Zombieland trailer in Firefox with the Firefox Download Manager and imported it into Final Cut Pro X.  I had already bought the Dead Island song by Giles Lamb, so using that felt appropriate as well.  After importing both the video and the audio, I had some fun.  First, I detached the audio from the video.  That was easy to do and allowed me to just delete the original audio that the trailer had on it.  After that, I placed the Dead Island song over the video.  I did a little bit of a staggered start and a crossfade to give the audio a little bit of an introduction as well.  After that, I went into the visual effect section and played around.  The visual effects that I used were ’50s style TV’, ‘vignette’, ‘black and white’, and ‘noise’.  The four of these really play hand in hand.  The 50s style TV gave it a little bit of an older look.  The vignette provided a border around the film to give it an older look, the black and white obviously is self-explanatory and the noise gave the black parts a little bit of texture.  All four of these effects proved to be useful and 100% necessary.  If I were to remove even one of them, the entire feel of the piece would change drastically.

Enough with all of the reading.  Here’s my clip!