Trailer moment

We've spent all our free time these last few weeks editing together this first official trailer for All That Remains.

When cutting a trailer together, it’s very much like cutting a short film, it has to have a sense of story line with  a beginning, a middle and an end. This is what makes editing trailers so hard. Sometimes less means harder work...

Another difficulty we faced was that we've so far shot under half of the movie, but it still had to feel as though we were watching glimpses of an entire movie. Luckily we've shot enough to be able to give an "impression" of the movie in it's entirety.

With this trailer, we also wanted to convey how the film will look in terms of the stylized blend of live-action and animation as a series of moving images as opposed to the stills we usually post on our blogs and FB pages.

The sound design was another aspect we paid a lot of attention to – while being conscious of not using too much sound FX. We always do a creative pass over the sound when working on an edit, in fact we're often thinking up ideas for sound design even at the scripting stage.

One idea we have for the sound design in the movie is to use music to symbolize both the beauty and the resilience of the human spirit, and we were keen to experiment with this idea when working on the trailer.

The way we were going to do this in the trailer was to have an orchestral track up until the moment of the bomb exploding, then switch to a choral version so we are left with only the sound of human voices on the soundtrack. This way, the lush orchestral sound (itself a collection of man-made instruments) would represent all the beauty and grandeur of man-made achievements (such as a city), and the human voices would come to symbolize the beauty and strength of the human spirit that still remains after all the magnificence of man-made greatness has been taken away.

But, on this occasion, the idea didn't work with the overall dynamism of the trailer, so we had to let it go. As filmmakers we have to be able to sometimes let an idea go, no matter how much we fall in love with it. 

Still, it's a design concept we will certainly explore and experiment with in the movie itself, as the survival of the human spirit is one of the main themes of the movie and music itself plays such a prominent role throughout. This idea of blurring the line between music and sound design has always excited us.

Despite all the work that goes into scripting, planning and directing, we find that much of the film’s final shape, actually takes form in the edit room, so for us, the most exciting thing about working on the trailer has been seeing it come together in such a way that we too could see a glimpse of the final film.