TV Trailer

Hi! So my first assignment, Trailer It (3 stars) was a lot of fun to make! I was deciding what I would make throughout the week and this one jumped out at me immediately. I am currently rewatching all of The Office on Netflix, when I get a free moment, and I thought this show would be perfect for a trailer! So I also thought I would go through and give some tips on how I edited the different clips all together.

Planning:

So once I knew the office was going to be the topic of my trailer. I took to YouTube to find some great moments that I could definitely use. I ended up searching “The Office Best Moments” and I found this video:

Now I admit, this wasn’t the best quality video to use, because of the numbers but I thought this would be great for the planning phase. I copied the video URL and pasted it into ClipConverter a handy website that allows you to convert YouTube videos and download them for personal use. I really like using this website because even though there are ads, its really straight forward in the process and it doesn’t take very long to convert the files. Here is what the website looks like.

 

So continuing with the planning phase, I went to iMovie with my new found footage in tow, and I was trying to figure out how I could make a trailer. I noticed that iMovie has these trailer templates that allow you to customize the trailer to your own footage. This is what some of the 29 different themes look like:

Creating:

So After I picked the theme for the trailer, which is the adrenaline one in the top right corner, I took the main video, The Office Best Moments, and imported it into iMovie. Because I picked the trailer theme, most of the base work was already done, I just needed to change some of the text and add the footage to the filmstrip. I then started adding it to the the layout of the trailer. The trailer themes have three options to add the footage to the film strip: outline, storyboard, and shot list. The outline tab, is basically where you type in all of the credits that is needed for the trailer. The Storyboard tab is where you can add the footage to the filmstrip and where you can edit the text that will show up in the final product. Finally, the shot list tab gives you an array of shots that will be used within the filmstrip, you can also add the footage in this tab. Personally I found that the storyboard tab was the best to add the footage because I could see where the footage was going.

The cool thing about using the pre-made trailer layouts, is that you can click on the specific clip and then you can add straight to the storyboard, and it will automatically trim that clip to the duration that it needs. So basically all you need to do is decide what clip you want to use! You don’t have to worry about making sure the clip is the right duration to use within the trailer. (I hope that makes sense!) Here’s a picture to show what it might look like:

 

After adding all of the footage to the filmstrip, adding the credits, and changing some of the text, this is what the trailer looked like!

Editing:

So this trailer is alright. There are some inconsistencies because of the giant numbers that show up in the bottom right corner. This was a huge mistake on my part because I realized the numbers were there after I went to export the file itself. So I decided to upload this anyway to show how I fixed the problem!

While the trailer was uploading, I started to fix it. I found that working with two different approaches was the best way to get my final product:

  1. Just simple cropping. This is pretty self explanatory because all I did was crop the shot so the numbers didn’t show up. I used this for most of the clips.
  2. For the second approach, I went to YouTube and found a different version for that specific clip. This worked better than cropping in some places because the shot would have been too tight for what was going on. I did this for the clip of Dwight, and his cousin Mose playing ping pong. This shot was an extremely wide shot and when I cropped it, only the ping pong table showed up.

 

Finalizing:

After I cropped the trailer to fix it I went to finalize the project. But before I exported it to upload the video to YouTube, I had my roommate watch it. I had her do this because it was a fresh set of eyes on the project and she would be able to see things that I may have over looked during the editing process. After working with her for a little and changing some things around I was finished! Now all I needed to do was export and upload the file to YouTube. I would have uploaded the trailer straight to YouTube from iMovie but it kept stopping the upload half way through. So I exported the file itself then I added the file directly to YouTube. So here is the final product!

I hope you guys enjoy this just as much as I enjoyed making it!

Katanagatari Trailer

And now for even more things, posted in a blitz on Sunday (as I have begun to suspect, this is a routine around here).

Here’s a trailer I made (with little or no help from anyone, including Master…) for an anime called Katanagatari.  I understand it has something to do with swords and stories (considering its name is a Japanese portmandeau for “sword” and “story”).  The anime itself is very pretty and I’ve liked what I’ve seen of it while making the trailer–but the uploading process unfortunately crunched it down to 320p, so…

Surf movie

A movie trailer

This was by far my favorite assignment i created! The assignment itself was to make a movie trailer for something you would want everyone to get excited about. Of course i took this opportunity to make a surf film!

I texted my friend Jessy and asked for any footage she had of us this past summer. We spend a lot of time in the water surfing together. But, we very seldom do we have someone take pictures or movies… The life of girl surfers -_-. haha Jessy and I always joke that our moms are our sponsors. They feed us and every now and then come watch us surf. So, that’s as good as we’ve got sponsor wise. :) Long story short, we don’t have a ton of shots from our surf sessions.

But, she helped me find what we did have. And i went to work to create our first film. I used a actual theme from imovie to create this cool movie trailer.

The project in Imovie actually guided me through the makings of this movie trailer. I plugged in the things i wanted the film to say. I added our names to the credits. Then, I started searching through pictures and videos from our surf trip to Wrightsville and random days in Vabeach.

I had a problem with adding the pictures as .mpeg files to the film. So, i created a new project for each photo and saved it as a video. Then, i uploaded the video to imovie and added it into my trailer

I didn’t like the music placed on the trailer so i saved the project. Then, opened it back up in Imovie as a film. Starting a new project, i dragged the film to the project and added my own music.

The waves may be the smallest ever seen in a surf film . However, I am pretty proud of this film!

 

Movie trailer

Have you ever tried to describe a movie or a TV show to someone but you just couldn’t find the right words? Well you know what they say a picture tells a thousand words; in that case a moving picture must tell about a million words. For my next original assignment, movie trailer,  create your own movie trailer for a film or even a TV show and show people why they’re worth seeing. The examples I have made for this assignment are actually all part of my final project, each detailing an anime I reviewed:

Like I said your movie trailer should try to capture the attention of the viewer and make them want to go out and watch whatever you’re promoting. Now I took two paths to doing this, the informative and the curiosity. For informative the examples are Eden of the East and Katanagatari, these trailers go over the grand plot. Telling you what the situations these characters are in and will face; and should incite your viewers to want to know what happens next for the man with the mysterious phone or what is so special about these blades of Shikizaki Kiki. For curiosity the example is Kill me baby, this trailer is supposed to make you question why these things are happening. It’s presented in a manner that gives you very little information, who are these girls? Are they friends, are they enemies? What led up to a situation where the blonde girl had to pole vault over a bear? In overall this should make your viewer want to know the answers and watch. Lastly my Fairy Tail trailer is kind of a mix. The start off is very informative, you’re told this is a world of magic and wizards who form and work in guilds. After presented with this information though you’re sort of blasted straight into the action of the series. You don’t know who these characters are or really what trials they’re facing but the action is moving by so fast that it becomes appealing to see these fantastical powers.

As an additional source of help I would like to walk you through the process I took with making these trailers. To be specific I’m going to show you how to make an anime trailer, since obviously that’s what I made, but you can no doubt take these same steps and apply them to any other sort of film, that is if you’re using Windows Live Movie Maker like I was anyways.

Step 1: Choosing your anime (obviously) Picking a series you like is a plus, but another thing you may want to consider is if the show has been dubbed in English yet. This honestly serves little purpose in the grand scheme of things, but let’s say there’s a scene you want to present muted with a score associated in for dramatic effect. Although you can remove the sound, the subtitles will still be showing throughout the video. This may just be me being a perfectionist, but those subs are really quite distracting to the viewers; not to mention may spoil a scene you may want to be mysterious. So the obvious method to solving this is to use dubbed anime as a material which for the most part has no subbing; or you can even try and use raw episodes, which are episodes in their original form and language; but those get increasingly harder to find after it’s finally subbed.

Step 2: Downloading or ripping material After selecting your series clearly the next step is to acquire as many clips and scenes as possible. If you have a DVD of the series then congratulations you just made your life easier. All you need to do is rip the material off them. The method I used was with the VLC media player which allows you to record the movie while playing. If you do not see this option, go into the view drop down menu and select advanced controls. After that just record any scenes you want, can’t be any simpler than that.

However if you don’t have a copy of the series then this gets to be pretty tedious. First and foremost, you need a way to download these videos online. What I have been using is the video download helper Firefox add-on. Where after downloading, you can easily download most videos online in varying formats. Next you need to find these animes and download them, this is where it can get tiresome and annoying if you’re searching for the best quality. A source I’ve been repeatedly using is the FUNimation Youtube page which actually offers many series online; you do have to make a trade-off with the FUNimation logo being stuck on the video but chances are if you got your materials from any other site they too have their logo or site name printed all over it. Download as many episodes as you need, I’ve downloaded literally entire series before just to compile into a 2 minute video.

Step 3: Editing With your clips in hand, now we move onto using Windows Live Movie Maker. How you start out your trailer is completely up to you, but the simplest and maybe even best way is to use the opening dialogue of the anime itself; which could be very informative or foreboding. This leads me to the tools you’ll be using, now hands down the tool I used most while editing is the split tool. If you want to take out a specific clip or scene from your video you can use the split tool to remove it from the original video which can then be placed any where you want. Alternatively, you could use the set start and end point function to do the same thing, but I prefer the split tool as you can still use the rest of your video while the start and end points remove anything that wasn’t selected. For the most part this is all you really need to do in selecting what to present in your video lather, rinse and repeat till you have all that you need.

Step 4: Audio Along with Windows Live Movie Maker a program that I use hand in hand with it is Audacity. For me, how long each clip made from the previous step would last depended on how long the audio I had accompanying it. You can of course just stick any old MP3 file on your video by dragging and dropping and have it play throughout; but that’s pretty lazy. I however, like to develop a score for my movies which usually involves me cutting highlights and fading in and out of songs. I would go into greater detail about this but Audacity is really quite straightforward, you just have to feel around for the controls at first and then you can mix any sound you like. But as for attaching sounds to your clips, what you may want to do first is mute them which is a rather easy process through the sliding bar pictured below. There are also more options on Movie Maker itself such as fade in and out, but since you’re using Audacity for most of your sound work already it’s not really necessary.

Step 5: Publishing Once you have your scenes and audio up there really isn’t much more to do, just simply save your video to your desktop. Keep in mind though that the point of a trailer is to show a preview of a film, don’t try to tell the whole story, leave the viewers guessing and wanting more. Try to keep it around 3 minutes maximum.

Lastly I just want to add that yes this tutorial would probably be much more bearable in video format, but just like all of you I am swamped with last weeks of classes and if I had more time I would gladly make this a video tutorial.

Trailer It

Have you ever tried to describe something to someone but you just couldn’t find the right words? What tells more about a movie than a movie trailer? Well you know what they say a picture tells a thousand words; in that case a moving picture must tell about a million words.

Create your own movie trailer for something you would likely not expect to see, e.g. for a class, a utensil, a cleaning product… Use all of the elements of trailers- the ratings, quick cuts, the deep narrated “In a World” voice- make it exciting!