The Enthrallment Trailer

Post Production Essay Consider the development of your skills in using Post Production across the 2 years and the effect or impact this has had on your creativity/cultural expectations

Post production is the evaluation of the product and the assessment of the skills that were either had by the student before production or developed through the production process and then used to put together the materials acquired to form a final product. Post production is much more thorough and expansive as many more hardware technologies and software programmes were used to create the finished products. This is because I was creating a magazine FC, poster, and film trailer. During filming it is important to follow a set shot list and shot schedule to ensure that everything that is needed to make a cohesive trailer with good continuity is created. However there is an element experimentation that is needed to create something creative and unique that will capture my audience more. This is why we decided to include the use of low tracking shots to create a more dynamic horror trailer which gave a creative twist which we had not initially planned for. This also ties into the aesthetics of the front cover, trailer, and poster. I had to experiment with the colour that we were going to use essentially for our house style in A2 and ensure that it is consistent in all 3 products.

My preliminary task was used as a way of developing and displaying my early photoshop and indesign skills. This was a critical period in my basic knowledge and initial use of skills that would underpin my work for the two years. During this time i wasn’t able to create something hyper realistic as i simply didn’t have the skills to create anything of such high quality. However this is a time period and task that had the highest level of experimentation as the criteria was broad enough that I could really be creative and see what would work for a college magazine.

Before the preliminary task I had no skills on photoshop. So during this time I learned how to remove green screen, layer photos, crop images, etc. Once again it wasn’t possible to create at this point a product with hyper reality as I didn’t have such developed skills but it was the skills I learned here that underpinned the aesthetic look for my Music Magazine.

I used two different programmes from my AS preliminary task and my A2 horror trailer. Despite this there were a number of skills that I learned early on and developed through the year and used to create a good A2 trailer. For example learning about house styles for magazines and how to present them is a skill that i had to use throughout my trailer. I chose a set colour palette that i would use to convey the same wanted mood through out the trailer and used colour grading and editing to change the hue of most to all of the shots and title slates in the trailer to. This created an altogether more cohesive and well rounded product that on face value looked like the desired product and similar to real life examples. So while I didn’t have much skills or experience at the beginning of the two years I used a lot of experimenting to create my product and through the use of the skills that I learned I created an aesthetically pleasing product. So this meant simply putting a filter over an image or sequence and seeing if that would work as i had previously not learned if it would work or not and then using the one that turned out the best.

In conclusion my understanding of post production skills has helped me create products much faster as i have consolidated and understood my work and what works. However a down side of this could be that i’m less likely to experiment as much and be as creative as i have become used to a certain way of doing things and following set conventions. On the flip side it could also be said that the better skills will allow me to make a better application of the creativity that i have and produce an all around better product.