Trailer

Alongside the Design Document as Research Document, I also intended to produce a short trailer promoting the animated graphic novel I would produce for BA8. I did not want to produce the trailer independently of the images I was producing so while working on the images for the Design Documents I was aware that some of them would be used in the trailer via After Effects.

Many companies are producing After Effects animated  trailers for their products, even those not in a graphic form, for instance novels such as the below trailer for Guillermo Del Toro (2011) and Chuck Hogan's (2011) 'The Strain' trilogy of books.

This in my opinion was a poor example of what could be produced using After Effects for product trailers, as it fails to show the tone or give a feeling of the style of the intended product, in this case a book.

A better example of an After Effects trailer for a book would be the following trailer for Scott Westerfields. 'Leviathan'...

It could be said that many companies, adhere to the adage 'No such thing as bad press' as they will often allow for any pieve of marketing for their product to be created, regardless of the quality. I intended my trailer to show not only the content of my graphic novel but primarily the tone as this is what would set it apart from others in it's media. While working on my images, I kept in mind that the best of them would be utilised for the trailer and therefore would need to be manipulated in After Effects. Knowing this I remembered to keep my images as layers and to as often as possible keep them wider than they would be normally so that I could animate them.

Taylor, (2010), advocates the use of After Effects to produce short animated trailers for films and other media and explains that they can be used to great effects to attract new audiences (pXIV)

Although I wanted to utilise the images I had already created, I also intended to produce a few images that would be used in the trailer only so that the whole thing would not just be recycled from my other project.

I began storyboarding the trailer, as I knew what I wanted to show...

For the finished trailer, I aimed to produce not only some images, but I also wanted to produce some effects that would be specific to my design such as the transformation effect from Finn to his Wraith armor and the ghost effect for Lacey, one of the supporting characters. I realised quickly that although some effects looked fine as a still image, they did not work as well when they were animated.