Hi! So my first assignment, Trailer It (3 stars) was a lot of fun to make! I was deciding what I would make throughout the week and this one jumped out at me immediately. I am currently rewatching all of The Office on Netflix, when I get a free moment, and I thought this show would be perfect for a trailer! So I also thought I would go through and give some tips on how I edited the different clips all together.

Planning:

So once I knew the office was going to be the topic of my trailer. I took to YouTube to find some great moments that I could definitely use. I ended up searching “The Office Best Moments” and I found this video:

Now I admit, this wasn’t the best quality video to use, because of the numbers but I thought this would be great for the planning phase. I copied the video URL and pasted it into ClipConverter a handy website that allows you to convert YouTube videos and download them for personal use. I really like using this website because even though there are ads, its really straight forward in the process and it doesn’t take very long to convert the files. Here is what the website looks like.

 

So continuing with the planning phase, I went to iMovie with my new found footage in tow, and I was trying to figure out how I could make a trailer. I noticed that iMovie has these trailer templates that allow you to customize the trailer to your own footage. This is what some of the 29 different themes look like:

Creating:

So After I picked the theme for the trailer, which is the adrenaline one in the top right corner, I took the main video, The Office Best Moments, and imported it into iMovie. Because I picked the trailer theme, most of the base work was already done, I just needed to change some of the text and add the footage to the filmstrip. I then started adding it to the the layout of the trailer. The trailer themes have three options to add the footage to the film strip: outline, storyboard, and shot list. The outline tab, is basically where you type in all of the credits that is needed for the trailer. The Storyboard tab is where you can add the footage to the filmstrip and where you can edit the text that will show up in the final product. Finally, the shot list tab gives you an array of shots that will be used within the filmstrip, you can also add the footage in this tab. Personally I found that the storyboard tab was the best to add the footage because I could see where the footage was going.

The cool thing about using the pre-made trailer layouts, is that you can click on the specific clip and then you can add straight to the storyboard, and it will automatically trim that clip to the duration that it needs. So basically all you need to do is decide what clip you want to use! You don’t have to worry about making sure the clip is the right duration to use within the trailer. (I hope that makes sense!) Here’s a picture to show what it might look like:

 

After adding all of the footage to the filmstrip, adding the credits, and changing some of the text, this is what the trailer looked like!

Editing:

So this trailer is alright. There are some inconsistencies because of the giant numbers that show up in the bottom right corner. This was a huge mistake on my part because I realized the numbers were there after I went to export the file itself. So I decided to upload this anyway to show how I fixed the problem!

While the trailer was uploading, I started to fix it. I found that working with two different approaches was the best way to get my final product:

1. Just simple cropping. This is pretty self explanatory because all I did was crop the shot so the numbers didn’t show up. I used this for most of the clips.
2. For the second approach, I went to YouTube and found a different version for that specific clip. This worked better than cropping in some places because the shot would have been too tight for what was going on. I did this for the clip of Dwight, and his cousin Mose playing ping pong. This shot was an extremely wide shot and when I cropped it, only the ping pong table showed up.

 

Finalizing:

After I cropped the trailer to fix it I went to finalize the project. But before I exported it to upload the video to YouTube, I had my roommate watch it. I had her do this because it was a fresh set of eyes on the project and she would be able to see things that I may have over looked during the editing process. After working with her for a little and changing some things around I was finished! Now all I needed to do was export and upload the file to YouTube. I would have uploaded the trailer straight to YouTube from iMovie but it kept stopping the upload half way through. So I exported the file itself then I added the file directly to YouTube. So here is the final product!

I hope you guys enjoy this just as much as I enjoyed making it!