Gopher Golf: Making the Trailer

This week, our university received the full details of a competition being judged by Cartoon Network. The brief was to create a trailer for our short films, using whatever completed material we had, including final footage, test footage, animatics, concept drawings and storyboards.

I wanted my trailer to sell my film and make audiences excited to see what would happen next. Therefore I centred my film around questions which sum up what the film is about, these being "what if you had only one second to change your destiny?" and "will the golfer be ready for his big game?".

The trailer has a dramatic first title card, accompanied by music, to set a very dark tone before surprising the audience by revealing this film is actually a very light-hearted comedy. The footage I shot especially for this trailer, of the golfer being hit by the golf ball, also shows audiences this will be a fun film.

I liked the idea of the trailer and I found it exciting seeing 2D and 3D come together for the first time in my own work. However, I really wish I had more time to work on it. I was working on the trailer on my laptop at home when a bug (caused by a fault with Skype) had caused the computer to crash altogether, losing all of my files. Thankfully my university work is backed up on numerous other devices, so I used a computer at the university to start the trailer again.

As a result of this, I had only a few hours to edit the trailer before its deadline, so although I met my deadline successfully, I would've liked more time to work on the lighting and chroma key effects in the trailer.