The final trailer for Caitlin Kiernan’s The Drowning Girl went live on March 3rd, 2012. Thanks to the promotions office at Penguin Books and some encouraging word-of-mouth from other fantasy writers, the trailer’s been accumulating an audience (and, we hope, spurring people to buy her book). We’d developed two distinct versions of the trailer in January. One began with moody shots of the various rivers, and another was built around the shots of the Imp character at her typewriter. Eventually, Caitlin decided to try a fresh start. taking a more direct and detailed approach to the editing. As she’s in Rhode Island and I’m in Philadelphia, and she doesn’t have editing software, we developed a workflow where she could refer to particular shots in previous drafts, referring to timecodes I’d placed in the videos. I could then arrange them, upload the next draft, and send emails with further suggestions and comments.
(It usually took my machine about an hour to render a trailer draft, and about half an hour to upload to YouTube. This is why this workflow works well for a trailer, but wouldn’t work for anything longer than five or ten minutes.)
When Caitlin approved the final draft, I made a set of very minor changes– half-second trims and extensions here and there, adjusting dissolves, but no radical changes– to balance the flows of video and music. Once she approved that, we were done. The video was uploaded to our YouTube channel, a video file was provided to Penguin for their use, and word was spread via LiveJournal, Twitter, close friends, book review sites, and more.
Several people have asked me about how we accomplished certain shots. The shot where the camera moves along the forest floor, past Eva, was done simply by holding the camera’s tripod upside-down and flipping the shot in post.
Most of the water shots were shot at 60fps, which facilitated graceful slow-motion of the moving water. The shot where Eva looks up from under her hood required some tricky color correction. These shots were filmed in January, and most of the background leaves were a light brown. We decided to try color-correction to make them more in-line with what we’d shot in October. One attempt gave us a rich, green-blue background, but Eva’s face was also green and pale; another attempt gave us good skin tones on Eva, but the background coloring was weak.
I used After Effects to create a matte around Eva’s hood, which enabled me to use the background from the green-blue shot behind her better-color-balanced face. Although the coloring in this shot is somewhat more theatrical than many of the other shots (in fact, almost no color correction was used in the rest of the project), we liked it a lot.