Learning from our mistakes

Hi!

Overview
Recently we decide to shoot some clips for our production title which appears at the beginning of the trailer. The original idea was to have the hand come from the top of the screen, scraping against a wall and then where the nails had ripped the wall, 'Terror Films' (which was our production title) appear from the ripped holes. Now on the whole this was a very tricky process to do and I believe that it would have required advanced knowledge on Adobe Premiere Pro, After Effects and Adobe Photoshop in order for this end result to be anywhere near what we wanted it to be, so we decided to change it.

We decided that we were just going to have a bloody hand coming from the top of the screen, scraping it's way down the bottom (as if the person was dying) and the 'Terror Films' was going to fade in, get bigger and then fade out in which we believed this was much simpler than what we had planned before. We took many pictures and clips for this part of the trailer which can be seen below:

As you can see, the paint and the potential 'blood' mix we used in order for the hand to look as if it was bleeding looked very cheap and unreal and this was a worry for us all as this was suppose to be for our production title. On the whole we spent an hour applying the blood and getting all the shots we needed for the trailer, but in every shot the blood just looked fake and the wall didn't look like a wall at all (since we had stuck black paper to an actual wall.

Over much deliberation we decided that we could not use the shot at all, no matter how much we lightened, darkened, used green screen etc it still looked like an amateur had done it and did not look scary at all, hence why we decided to scrap the idea altogether and put something else. We want our trailer to look as real and as professional as possible and if we had added these clips to our trailer then it would have made the whole trailer look out of place.

What I have learnt?

I have learnt that things may not always go to plan when it comes to making anything in general so we should always have a back-up in mind (in which we are currently constructing). Even though we did not expect this go wrong, we can learn from this process and try and use the best materials as possible in the best lighting conditions.