Over the course of this semester the team and I have been warned that our game is in jeopardy of not making it through to the spring semester. This would entail that the team is split among one or more teams that do make it through, and that we would cease to work on this project. Everyone on the team is striving towards us making it through. In an effort to circumvent that my main task this past week was to focus on the creation of a trailer. My goal for this trailer has been threefold: communicate the intended experience, generate excitement, and give peek into the narrative direction enough to create curiosity.

To start off I realized that a trailer needs to have a solid song in order to generate excitement. This song not only needed to achieve that goal but also fit within our sound direction. I started off my research combing through the drive in which Richard Conti, the team designer, had originally found the starting pieces. One by one I selected and listened to many songs in a row for a couple hours. As I went along I saved the songs that I felt fit within the direction. For those that I have ideas in regards to how they could be used I saved with them labeled as such. Out of the 25 final selections, so far, only two I thought would fit as trailers.

Once I had my two songs in hand the next step was to run them by the team. It surprised me how fast everyone gravitated towards and accepted one over the other. With the song nailed down my next step was to listen to the song repeatedly while imagining what could be happening visually. As I went along I would write timestamp sections of when the music changed. As a team, we’ve discussed at length about the narrative and what is key to selling our idea. Thus, when I brought my first draft to the team they’ve quickly attached to the general flow and approved me for my next step of setting up the Premiere Pro project file.

This past summer I worked as a Video Editing Intern and an important lessoned I learned during that was planning and organizing up front. Many times I would be searching repeatedly through folders upon folders to find clips. This time I’ve set up both a Google doc with a clip hierarchy as a reflection of my folders in the project. Another aspect I’ve set up is putting markers at key points in the storyboard. With these two practices in place I’ll be able to build out the visuals in a much more streamlined process.

In order for me to have prepared this much the whole team needed to have the same vision. This allowed me to have a general grasp of not only what was integral to the idea but how best to communicate our values. I am excited to release my work out to the public!

Thank you for reading!

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