Viral Ad & Evaluation/Breakdown

My Viral Ad is a trailer for my FMP film called Dark Passenger. I decided to make this because it will give the audience a brief synopsis of the film and show them small footage from the film as well as some information on who is starring and who made the film. I have also added a few motion graphics to the trailer using after effects.

The first thing I did for the clips of my Viral Ad was colour grading, I wanted my clips to look dark and more crisp. Below is a before and after of my colour grading of one of the scenes.

Before

After 

In order to make this possible I put the clip into after effects and used the 'curves' effect. This effect allows you to change the RGB, Alpha and Blue, Red and Green individual to give your footage the right effect. To start with I used the RGB Channel making 3 points on the curve line in order to bring my whites and blacks lower and then brightening the right parts of the clip. After this I changed the curve to Red channel and by dragging the middle of the curve down bring the reds down made the clip a slight green tinge to it, then finally I went to the Blue channel and raised the blue which gave the clip a dark/nigh time effect to it which for me makes the entire scene a lot more eery and suited to the scene.

After this I made two titles which I put in my Viral ad to create an atmosphere and give the audience an small idea about the character in the film, these titles read 'A Serial Killer' 'With a Conscience' Below is a image of what the titles looked like.

This is only the middle part of the first title, to the left reads 'A' and to the right reads 'killer'. 'A' has already been in shot and 'Killer' comes up after 'Serial'. What happens in this part is the writing is all their part the audience read what the light shows. This is simple to create, what is done is a background is put into after effects, and then add my text, I made my text and background 3D by clicking the small cube option by their layer. After this I added a 35mm camera to be able follow the text and light. After this I added the light layer made its brightness to 235% and then made the lights colour from white to red, I chose red because i felt it made the title more dark and creepy to go with the tone of the ad. After this I change the position of the light so it was just below the text, this helped brighten the text in parts. Finally I changed the lights point of interest so it starts on one side, started the stop watch on its point of interest to create a key frame then moved down the timeline 3.5 seconds and changed the lights point of interest to the other side of the text. This then made the light travel from one side of the title to the other so the audience has time to read what is said. I then exported this, then went back to it, changed what the writing said for my second title and then centred the writing and exported it so I had both my titles.

After this I created to more titles which read 'Directed by Shaun Alexander' and 'Produced by Forest Light Pictures' this title is shown below.

These titles appear on screen for 3.5 seconds and appear in-between one clip to show the audience quickly a bit about who made the film. In both of the titles the top text which reads Directed by and Produced By stay the same but the text below them both expand as the clip goes on, this isn't done by scaling the writing though. To begin with a put the first text in reading Directed by and scaled it down and centred it in middle of screen and then moved the position just above centre. Then I put the second text in reading Shaun Alexander and did the same except made the text larger and just below centre. All text was written in capitols. The to create the metallic look to it I added the ramp effect to the top text, and then moved the start and the end point of the ramp which gave it the look so the dark is on the right and its lighter on the left. Then I added an Emboss and changed the contrast. After this I added the levels effect and changed the each side of the holograph which made it slightly darker and took some of the whites out of it. Now that this was done I copied all of the effects i just done and then pasted them on to the lower text so both text matched each other. Finally I added my animation to the bottom text. Rather then scale I used the effect called tracking, which spreads the letters out. To do this I selected the bottom text, started the stop watch key frame moved to 3 seconds and made the tracking to 6 and this then made the letter scale outwards.

Once all these motion graphics were completed they was all exported and the put into Final Cut Pro 7 to be edited together. I then used dialogue from other clips of the film and put them in different parts of the clip to make it seem more dramatic. and then I added a dramatic soundtrack over the entire trailer to give it rhythm and I tried to cut each scene to the song like a music video to give it a better dramatic effect.