Trailer edit I made of The Greatest Dancer. Read below to follow along my editing process and how I did this. Enjoy the video!
I began the edit by searching on YouTube for some clips of the dances, as I knew I wanted to include dance in my video. I downloaded them from YouTube and began making a sequence of them. I cut them down to short 3 second clips, pieced them together and added a flash transition in between each one. Pretty simple. At this point, just when I was making a start, I had a rough idea in my head of what I wanted it to look like. Although, I felt confused as to how to make my idea come to life properly. I was really stuck, and almost scrapped my idea entirely. I knew what I wanted the finished product to look like, I just didn’t know how to get there. It seemed so epic in my head but what I was creating was so underwhelming.
After realising I needed some help, I looked up on YouTube the original series trailer and analysed what they did. I picked up on a few things and began feeling inspired. I made the decision to use that video as a guide/structure for my video. I deleted what I had done before and completely started over. I followed exactly what the video did, but recreated it using my clips instead. At this stage (Roughly 10 seconds into my video) my video was starting to look how I wanted it to. This made me excited. Maybe this won’t be as bad as I thought?
My dad mentioned to me that you can use Filmora (The editing software I use) to screen record. This meant that I was able to get clips of the Dance Captains talking and reacting to the performances, which was perfect for my trailer.
I structured my trailer by putting a few clips of dance and then a clip of one of the dance captains talking but overlapping the audio halfway to make the trailer more interesting. One thing I noticed in the original trailer was every 10 seconds text would pop up and it would say something like ‘1 Mirror’ or ‘1 Winner’ so I tried my best to include something similar to this in my video. The last 2 steps were adding music and transitions.
In the video I saw that they used upbeat background music without singing, so I decided to make my music the same genre. I feel that upbeat music makes trailers more vibrant and entertaining, so I knew what music I used was important. In terms of transitions I ended up using mostly flash transitions for the appeal of excitement and 1 dissolve transition near the beginning just to help add some flow to my video. I also like making sure I fade in and fade out most of the audio, especially the music, as it makes the audio less choppy and again, helps the trailer flow more. After completing the final steps my trailer was complete! I ended up being fairly happy with the result, but I do feel that if I were to do a similar project again in future, there would probably be lots I would do differently.
This image shows how the video looked in the editing software after I completed it.
