Premiere - Evaluation

Now that I have created my Premiere DVD Trailer. I am at a stage where I am happy that it is completed. With this in mind I have decided to evaluate my product. The main aspect I will be looking at is what works and what doesn't work, what I like and what I am not so keen on. I will also look at changes that I would make if I was to undertake this task again along with an evaluation of how I spent my time and if I would change this in the future.

I am going to start with the aspects that I like and don't like about my DVD trailer. My favourite aspects are comedy of the clips I have chosen. I like the way this had made the whole DVD feel light hearted when the underlying issue is probably slightly less comical. I like the way the comedy clips always show the female to be in control of the situation, this shows the girl power I was going for throughout the whole of this assignment. I particularly like the initial clip of Mila Kunis, I feel this clip is very prominent and memorable and I hence feel this was a really good way to start the trailer. It is also funny without being too much.

My second favourite element of my DVD trailer is the transition I have created from one place to another, this is in the form of New York to Paris. I feel I was able to choose appropriate clips to suit each location. The title clips between these two help to set the scene although I think the transition is obvious enough that if this title was to be taken out you could still understand what was happening and I really like this aspect for that reason. The New York clips help to set the scene of what has happened while the Paris clips show that this isn't a problem for the girls. The mood changes as the place changes and I feel this really works well with both clips and audio.

An aspect which I hadn't really put much thought into was the length of the clips. To begin with I simply cut the clips to suit which aspects I wanted to take from the original footage however when I play back my DVD trailer I am really pleased with how I have managed to use both longer and shorter clips. I feel the shorter clips allow diversity and keep the audience engaged as the scene is always changing while the longer clips allow for the story as such to be told. Again this has changed with the location and unintentionally I have managed to have my longer clips telling the story while my short clips keep the audience wanting more. This makes sense as the longer clips are meant to inform the audience however the shorter clips at the end really get the viewer hooked which is very similar to most good DVD trailers.

This leads me on nicely to my least favourite element. This is the titles. Initially I really liked these as in the preview section of premiere they seemed to look perfectly fine however after exporting these were really poor and hence I went and changed these slightly. Even with these changes I still feel that these are the weakest aspect of my trailer. I did try various fonts and colours to try to improve this professionalism however nothing seemed to make a considerable difference. At this stage I feel the titles are average, I don't think they let the trailer down as I think the rest of the trailer makes up for this but I do think that the overall professionalism of the trailer would be increased if these titles were improved.

The next aspect which I want to look at is how this element of the assignment ties in with the previous. Consistency has always been a big aspect for me as I believe that consistency is the key to a professional product. I think in some respects I struggled to achieve this with my DVD trailer but I think this is mainly based on the fact that my other two elements, in terms of the DVD Inlay and the Disk Design, were tied together by colour. Apart from titles I had little way of adding and bringing this colour scheme into my DVD Trailer. Of course I kept certain things consistent like the actors and the general theme but to me these were obvious things. You wouldn't go and make a DVD trailer which included different actors to those which you were advertising on the front of your DVD Inlay. This said I did end up using a few extra actors as these really made the clips I used. These are not included on the front of my DVD Inlay but I could justify this in terms of saying that these are not main characters just regular actors in my film. I feel that in an ideal world I would have maybe created my trailer first and then tailored my other elements around this as images are a lot easier to come across than film footage.

Along with the idea of consistency comes the titles. Originally I used a bright pink main body colour and then a light purple outer stroke. This was to suit my colour scheme however as mentioned above this was hard to read and looked unprofessional and hence I then changed this to a bright pink main body colour with a black outer stroke. This made the text stand out but now didn't really work with my colour scheme. After deliberation I am not to bothered by this factor as I would rather have a title which can be easily read. I still used pink in the title so it is not completely different.

As you can see from the beginning of my DVD trailer I added the company logo onto my first title clip. This hit the mandatory requirement as well as acting as a element which tied all three areas together. I am pleased with how this looks however I feel I could have improved this further if I had of added my film logo. This is something which would have been simple but I simply forgot.

Looking at the video transitions I used I feel that I used a wide enough mix to create diversity while keeping them consistent by repeating some. The main two which I used were Cross Dissolve (this is one used heavily in industry) and Additive Dissolve. I felt these two gave off the most professional and smooth transitions. I did also use a couple of other transitions which can be see in an earlier blog post. I feel that sticking to two main transitions kept my trailer consistent while adding a couple of different themes every now and again kept the trailer interesting. I also didn't use transitions between every clip as I feel this is unnecessary and can end up looking unprofessional. I did have to be careful where I decided to do this as some clips really needed a transitions. It worked out that the longer clips suited the transitions more than the shorter clips and hence my positioning reflects this. I changed the length of some transitions again based on how it worked with the clip and overall I am happy that my trailer runs smoothly from one clip to another with or without a transitions. I feel I have changed the length of the transitions to suit the clips and I feel that the transitions are noticeable but not too prominent.  

With only three main audio songs I decided to add transitions between these. Due to the fact that the audio is so key to a trailer I had to be really careful about how and where to position these as they were very noticeable. I started with the constant gain transition as this seemed appropriate as the trailer went from no sound to full sound. I then added exponential fade to the end of this clip and the beginning of the next clip. These are on separate audio layers and hence it was difficult to make this work however I am overall pleased with the transition I created here. Constant Power was one of my favourite transitions as you didn't lose any of the original music they both simply played over each other. This was positioned between the second and third clip. I ended with Exponential Fade. Again the reasoning's for this are self explanatory as the music needed to fade out. Overall I feel these few and simply audio transitions have made the audio run a lot smoother and the start and ending of the trailer appear much more professional than if the music was to simply start at full volume and the suddenly end.

Overall I feel that my DVD trailer looks professional and is as consistent as I feel possible with the other two elements of my assignment. I am really pleased with how each clip has come together and how the intended DVD theme has been portrayed.

With this in mind I am going to look at what I would change if I was to undertake this task again in the future. The main aspect I feel I would change are the titles. I think I have made it clear throughout that this is, in my opinion, my weakest element of the DVD trailer. Although I did try many different designs with these titles I feel that I would look into changing these if I was to undertake this task again. I also think I would look into adding different songs, I do feel these work well but I question whether they are others which may work better. This is something I haven't looked into and hence have no answer for at the moment however I think the first song in particular could be improved and hence I would most likely change this if I had the chance again.

The final aspect I am going to review is the way I spent my time.  The most time consuming element of this task was gathering my sources. It took me ages to find the clips which I wanted to use but also ones of good quality. I feel this is an aspect which I could have done quickly if I hadn't of been so fussy and hence I don't regret spending so much time on this because I feel it is time well spent overall. I would rather have spent more time on this and have higher quality clips to work with than grab the first clip I found and then ended up with a varying quality trailer. I spent a considerable amount of time playing around with all of the different transitions, both audio and video and the video effects. I am currently in two minds over the amount of time I spent looking at these. On one hand I feel that by playing around with these at the beginning I then had a strong ground to work with as I knew which I liked and which I didn't. I also feel that looking at these at an early stage gave me a chance to change my mind if I found a transition or effect that would work well on a certain clip for example. On the other hand however I feel that I stuck to quite a niche group of transitions and effects that I arguably wasted so much time looking through them all. I think that I probably could have managed by trying different transitions and effects as I went along however I felt a lot more comfortable knowing what they do before adding them to a clip and hence I think I prefer to trial aspects before rather than during and for that reason I don't think I spent too much time on this I feel that maybe in future I should just prepare for this as it ended up eating into the time which I could have been creating my final trailer. It took me ages to get my titles to a place which I was happy with, this is in terms of my first shot and my final titles. I feel I did spend a lot of time on these however as I am still not 100% happy with the result I would definitely spend a lot more time here if I was to undertake this task again.

To summarise I feel that I am happy with my final product even though there are elements which I feel could be improved. I feel that I have learnt a lot in regards to time keeping and how to spend my time which I could take forward into other aspects of my degree.