Editing: Sound Effects And Lighting

We have started to edit our trailer, on this post we show you what we have done to edit the sound and lighting.
We knew that we were going to have a variety of different sounds in our trailer because we know sound adds to the intensity and build up of the film it's advertising, especially in a horror film. A lot of the sound used in our trailer is already heard when we were filming, but some of the sounds and/or sound effects were added on afterwards in case the recorded sound wasn't loud enough, not what we wanted etc. 

When editing our trailer we have taken into consideration that the sound needed to be edited, either we add an effect or we fade in/out the sound. In the picture above it shows that we have been fading in and out the sound. Fading in and out a sound creates tension when watching a trailer and gives it more of an effect, rather than just having a sound entering and leaving very quickly which personally we think sounds quite rushed and strange when it's put over a scene.

We also found that some of the shots, especially the ones filmed in 'Ella's' bedroom, were slightly darker than others or in general too dark. We thought that all of the shots obviously should have the same brightness/contrast from whatever angle because it would look a bit strange and unprofessional if one shot was brighter than the other. To fix this problem, we used the 'Exposure' tool on Final Cut Pro to increase the light intensity and contrast of the different shots we filmed. We highlighted certain areas of the shots that we think would, in real life, be darker than other areas and balanced the brightness so that all the shots were the same and not brighter than each other.

In the screen shot above, you can see how we edited the brightness/contrast of a shot to make sure that the 

light intensity's were balanced in every one. We decreased the Shadows by -2%, making the image look slightly darker in places and therefore, creating a fear and making the scene more tense and spooky. We then increased the Midtones of the shot by 23%, making the colour of the shot more visible and improving the quality of the image. Finally, we increased the Highlights by 17%. By doing this, it highlighted the main objects in the shot, in this case it would be Ella and the cupboard. This gave an idea to the viewer of what could happen in this scene and what they should be focusing on when watching it.