trailer evaluation

As I have taken Media Studies for A level, I already have a knowledge of searching for genre conventions of trailers, so ideas of what to include in my trailer came naturally; I was keen to have short bursts of action (old school pac-man eating his 3d incarnation, and facing off against gangstas), dramatic text between shots ('BUT THIS TIME'), and a one liner ('this punk be more like 2pac man!').
However, despite a growing trend towards imitating hollywood film trailers in the games industry, there remain many trailers that are old fashioned or completely off-the-wall; adding to this, my trailer was for a flash remakle of Pac-man, and therefore had to be created on flash. Therefore, a level of improvisation here was essential, especially considering a clear look and feel had not been picked out at the presentation, but rather a combination of all 3 look and feel ideas. This meant a larger degree of freedom but more thought needed to actually implement everything; as a result, the trailer has also ended up a little longer than 30 seconds. However, I believe the 30 second limit is detrimental to the aim of creating a trailer, considering most trailers I studied went on for a matter of minutes.
Creating the trailer footage on flash lead to some issues as well. Firstly, I realised after creating half of it that movie clips would not appear when it exported as an avi and had to go back and change each movie clip to frame by frame sequences, which was a very time-consuming task. To add to this, exporting as an avi rather than swf made the animation lower quality than I'd anticipated; I also had to export it another time simply because I didn't click to enable sound initially, which I'd assumed would have been something that worked by default. Everything stayed in sync and was lag-free, on the other hand, so it was not total failure.
Once imported to After Effects, the first thing to do was attempt to improve the quality in some sections; I therefore edited the opacity to improve this slightly. I also played around with positioning, enlarging, and shrinking the video for extra zoom effects and shaking effect on the eating scene. I also added a rotation spin on the end to add to the impact of the gunshot. After effects was annoying with rendering and exporting however... this could also have been due to the college computers. They continued to run out of disk space when rendering, but the movie worked when done as an export. I don't see how the changes made the file so much larger, that was unexpected as well.
Overall After Effects proved a handy tool, but I found no use in this project for its 3d capabilities. Had I been using 3ds max as well, it would have been a different story I imagine. If I were to use after effects more in the future, I would certainly look more into its 3d capabilities and other features. I'm not so keen on premiere, it seems overly fussy with files. As for my video, I'm fairly happy with how it's turned out; however, I hope the next flash fixes the problem where flashes refuse to export movie clips properly when exporting to avi format.