Post production: cutaway shots

While we were editing our film trailer, we came to the conclusion that we were moving away from the codes and conventions of film trailers, as we had many longer, structured shots that were beginning to tell the story; this is something we wanted to avoid as it was what bought our original trailer down. Because of this, we made the decision to include a number of cutaway shots that we would intersperse throughout the trailer. These shots would be of the female antagonist, and despite the fact that they weren't originally planned, we are going to include them to build suspense for the audience, as well as follow the conventions of trailers being short and not revealing too much of the plot. We decided to film these shots in a graveyard, as we felt it would aptly connote the representation of death, which will link with the earlier scenes of the cemetery and potentially bring the audience to the conclusion that the figure is the 'dead' partner, though it could be provide ambiguity for the audience.

The areas that we felt needed to be interspersed with the cutaways were the scenes in the dark room and the female protagonist photographing following the death. The dark room scene is where the protagonist begins to notice a figure in her pictures and so we felt it would be an appropriate time to bring in further clues that will introduce the audience to the idea of the partner not being dead; it would follow the conventions of a thriller as it would build tension and keep the audience in suspense, as they would be unaware of the outcome of the situation. The cutaway shots that we filmed showed a female in a green coat - the same green coat that the female's partner was wearing as she left the house, before being hit by the car. We decided to do this to allow the audience to make connections with the opening scenes and the cutaways. The shots filmed in the graveyard will potentially foreshadow the future events within the film, as well as the graveyard having connotations of death and danger.

We uploaded the footage that we took, and came to the conclusion that the lighting was too bright to be portraying a sinister tone; as a result we edited the brightness and contrast to remove some of the colour and give colder more serious tone to the shots. We did the same to the colour toning, where we took some of the saturation out to reduce the vibrancy of the footage.