As part of the week’s activities we were to create a video “teaser” trailer about our project according to the following instructions.

“Making a trailer may initially seem an unusual activity in a photography course, but trailers have become a useful tool for blockbuster exhibitions in recent years, with varying approaches and budgets. Furthermore, making a trailer is a great way to step outside your comfort zone and refine your sense of storytelling, as well as being a good way to explore the fundamental time-based relationship between images and words.  Think about which images of yours (or others’) can help express / reveal key parts of your project. Think about how to get your audience interested in the images, how to build tension (or not) and how to release that tension.”

Suffice to say this task did push up against the boundaries of my comfort zone, but not as severely as creating the Positions and Practice Oral Presentation.  Having scaled the steepest part of the learning curve then made this time seem much less overwhelming.  During P&P, I tried to use Adobe Premier, but just couldn’t seem to make it do what I wanted it to do in the time frame I had  for the OP.  I ended up using PowerPoint and converting the presentation to video, but I did gain a bit of experience with Premier that made jumping back in for this exercise much less about “which buttons control which functions?” and more about turning a concept into a reality that met the brief within the prescribed limit of 2 minutes.

It also is clear that I am becoming more comfortable with the idea of using my images to tell a story; an aspect of my photographic practice that was always noticeably absent.  There has in fact been a distinct shift in the approach to my practice and while I will still  photograph something because it appeals to my eye, the majority of my work now is far more purposeful.  I start a shoot with a much clearer intention and sense of what I will need to tell the story I have in mind.

The result was successful overall, though I wish I could have gone a wee bit longer to allow for a better ending on a natural break in the music track.  I believe I used images and music to convey a dramatic tension and the overall sense of the project.  The result can be viewed in the link below using the password Falmouth.