Editing: Transitions and Titles

When creating our trailer, we knew that a lot of trailers, not just horror trailers in general, contained transitions with different text on them, possibly explaining certain parts of the plot or just building up the tension in general. Below are some examples of this from the films 'Insidious', 'Orphan', 'Sinister' and 'The Possession': 

We decided to include this in our trailer as we wanted to achieve the tension build up and give the audience a bit more of an idea of what our film is about. Also, to give the trailer a bit of a variety rather than just having lots of different shots. Below is a screenshot of what our transitions and texts look like during the post production of our trailer. We didn't want to make the texts too short in case the viewer would be unable to read what it said and therefore, be confused. However, we didn't want to make them too long either in case it got boring and the tension build up decreased because of the length of time taken to move to the next shot in our trailer.

Below is what our text looks like in our trailer. We wanted our font to be quite simple, and not too over the top because we believe that sometimes, less is more and having a serif font gave it a sort of 'old-fashioned' effect which makes it look more spooky. We also noticed that a lot of trailers have serif fonts on their texts too and so we were influenced by this. We tested out sans serif fonts too just so we could get an idea and a variety of what font to use, but we decided that a serif font definitely looked better and so decided to use this. We also decided to have the background black and the font white. Although this is quite simple, we wanted it to contrast well and to not be too over the top. Again, we agreed that less is more and thought that if the background and font colour is simple, we could add effects to the text so it didn't look too over the top but wasn't boring either.

The font we finally decided to use was 'Trajan Pro'. We really liked this font as it was all in capital letters which we think stand out more and look more bold and dramatic. We also think the font linked really well with our chosen genre for our trailer and looked really spooky. We decided the font size should be 104 because we felt this was big enough to read but not massive so it looked really out of place. We worked hard to make sure the text was exactly in the middle of the screen and it all blended really nicely by adjusting the line spacing, tracking and baseline.

We then thought about what effects we could put on our trailer. Again, we wanted them to be simple but look really effective and to make sure they related to our chosen genre of Horror. Also, we didn't want to add the same effects to our text shots that we added to our title because we thought that, although it would go well, it would look really boring and we wanted it to look different.
We added a 'Fade to colour' transition onto our text. This quickly fades the previous shot into a black screen where our text then appears. We really like this as we felt it looked really effective and dramatic and would keep the audience wondering what's happening next.

Finally, we added the effect 'Subway Shadow' to the text. This made the text flash and gave a sort of 'flickering light' effect which we thought was really effective and looked spooky which links to our chosen genre.