Hello? Trailer - After Effects

Hello? Trailer from Emma Nicholson on Vimeo.

As a part of a beginner After Effects tutorial we had to create a movie trailer using images and sounds, and also typography in my case. I gathered around 20 images and a range of audio to choose from. My trailer would bebased on something similar to the Termanator films in which computers are developing a free will and want to lash back at humans. My images consist or ranges of technology like server racks, motherboards and circuitry etc, and my audio is a simple dial up tone. 

To start with we created a new composition for our audio, we imported the audio from out assets folder and placed it on the timeline. I grabbed the edges of the timeline box which represented my audio and cropped the beginnign and ending bits of sound I did not want. I also trimmed gaps in the middle of the audio by duplicating my audio and cutting from one area of the track to the next. I trimmed the gaps in between the initial bleeps from the dialing so it sounded quicker and gave the trailer a rushed pace. I saved the composition and created another for the whole trailer. I imported all my images from my assets folder and also my audio composition.In the timeline I created 20 new colour layers and made them all different colours so I could tell them apart, I then one by one dragged and dropped the images into each layer. To make timing the images easier I placed markers along the timeline ruler which I can snap the layers to, a good trick to make this easier was to do a RAM preview and press the '*' key to add a marker to the beat of the audio. After the markers were placed I cropped and placed the layers along the timeline accordingly, whilst also making minor tweaks. After some fine adjustments the main body of my trailer was finished so I saved the file.

After the main part of our main trailer was finished we were then told about a few tips to make our workflow faster. I learnt that you can trim layers easily by placing the timeline bar over a section of the layer and pressing Alt and a square bracket will trim the layer where the bar is, also that pressing Alt and the arrow keys moves the bar one frame at a time and I also found out that pressing Cmd and D will duplicate the layer. This part of the tutorial was about adding the finishing touches and polishing the trailer. We were shown examples of transitions from existing animations, we saw how different transitions gave a different feeling so it is essential I consiter the mood of the trailer before doing my transitions. We were shown how to crossfade between layers, before we did thid however we needed to know how to create keyframes, and to do this you simply expand the editable options on the layer and highlight the stopwatch icon and it will automatically add a keyframe when a value is changed. The only value we changed was the opacity to fade the image out gradually for the next to fade in after it, I did a very quick crossfade as too long will look relaxed and more suited for a romance trailer, I wanted mine to look snappy but not too harsh that it distracts you, so I opted for the quick crossfade.

Too add some interest to the trailer we were told to look for some stock footage to overlay over our trailer to give it another layer of depth, rather than it looking like plain flat images. I chose some wavy patterns to almost represent the wavelengths of thought from the newly consious computers, like digital brainwaves. I imported the file into my composition and placed it in the middle of the timeline to spice up the less active part of the trailer, I then lowered the opacity and used the multiply effect so it only shows through the darkest colours ont he image, blendinging it in even more so it is almost impossible to distinguish the two pieces as seperate footage. Then to finish with I went through all my images and adjusted the levels of colour so they all had a similar level of whites and blacks, this way they would all fit in together and not look like blatantly different images that have nothing to do with each other. To add these adjustments it work nearly the same at PHotoshop in which you add a new adjustment layer and make the changes you want, and like Photoshop the adjustment layer effects every layer below it. And the final touch I thought would be a slight amount of noise to show the noise traffic in data and to also enhance the dial up nostalgia so the audience connect to the trailer on a slightly emtional level.

And once everything was finished it was time to export the file in high quality and low resolution for uploading to the web. I simply added it to render que at 720p, lossless and in Apple Pro Res 4444 format.