Film Editing - Photoshop

As the most experienced in the group with Photoshop, I was in charge of producing the film title and institutional information for our film. We would have made them on the film editing programme but we didn't want to waste time finding out how to create text on a programme we know very little about. I also suggested using Photoshop because I wanted to put on the production company logo and effects - both of which could not be done without Photoshop.

Making the title was relatively easy as I already had an idea of what it wold look like. I kept to the original idea of 'in the' being a bold, white font and 'shadows' in a slanted font with a shadow behind it. I put a layer mask over 'shadows' so that the first half of the word looked like it was hidden in shadows, which I achieved by putting a gradient from black to white over it and adjusting the opacity until the word was only just visible. I then put a drop-shadow onto the word, which wasn't visible on the black background, and moved it until just the top of the shadow was visible on the 'in the'. I did this to emphasise the idea of darkness and making sure that the top half of the title didn't look out of place by being just plain white.

I used the same technique of a gradient overlay on the 'coming soon' screen shown after the title. this was to fit in with the title and to establish a theme that could be used on other promotional devises - such as posters. I found in my research that this screen usually has a website and/or a hashtag on it, so I added them onto the screen in a different font to make them stand out but not look out of place. I added a soft glow behind them to make them stand out more and to contrast with the idea of darkness. I decided to put in the bright version of our production company logo as it makes it stand out from the monochrome colour scheme and would catch the audience's attention.

For the institutional information, I searched for what other thriller films had used and based ours on what I found. Most of them had the job titles smaller than the names so I copied that format, along with the jobs that were featured on the screen. All of the jobs were done by the three people in my group, but I wanted the screen to look professional so I included others from our class in this screen.

While researching, I noticed that almost every trailer had a green screen at the start stating the age rating of the film. I based our one off of these by using the same font and format as the ones I found, but editing it to fit with our film.

The production logo had already been made so I didn't have to make one while editing. I darkened the colours to fit with the dark genre and to instantly connote to the audience that they are about to watch a horror trailer. There is also a wipe transition used when this screen is shown in the trailer to grab the viewer's attention and to add some movement to the logo - as we don't know how to animate it. This makes the company seem professional and also interests the audience as it's the only transition that isn't a fade or cut.