Movie Trailer Assignment
I love movie trailers.
An awful movie trailer is something we remember because it’s just that: Awful. Maybe it was boring. Maybe it gave away the ending of the movie. Who knows? We just remember how awful it is, or forget it immediately.
A great movie trailer is memorable, not merely as an advertisement, but something that can stand on its own, even after watching the film that is being previewed. It truly is an art.
I try to incorporate what I love into class when I can, and the movie trailer seemed like a perfect opportunity. As part of broadcast journalism, students must create compelling, competent stories that encapsulate hours worth of interviews, footage and research in about a minute and a half. Plus, I needed them to get practice using Final Cut Express, so much so that they’re not thinking about editing at all–only content.
So the idea was simple: Have students watch a movie and edit it down into a trailer that is 2-2:30 minutes long.
When I initially came up with this idea, I had wonderful visions of wildly creative trailers where students could use their imaginations and create something amazing. Just like some genius did by re-imagining The Shining:
Unfortunately, the reality of technology makes this difficult. One of my friends taught a class on the movie trailer and had students edit together whatever trailer they wanted. Unfortunately, this meant that he had to upload about 20 different movies so that the students would have the raw footage to edit. If you consider it takes about 2-4 hours to convert movies to the proper format, and then another 1-2 hours to render the footage in Final Cut so you don’t have to re-convert it every time you open up the movie…well, that means anywhere from 60 to 100 hours of time just getting the movies in the proper format. Ugh.
So, I decided to limit things a bit so students could just select from a few films.
The key was that they still got to be creative which, in early journalism classes, can be tough. Hell, anyone can have students exercise their creativity in “Feature Writing” or “Opinion Writing.”
So, as I was saying, for this assignment students had to create a movie trailer. It had to be one of these three films: Planet of Dinosaurs, Kingdom of the Spiders, or Frogs.
Why these three movies?
1) Planet of Dinosaurs does not have a trailer, and, as you can see, the existing trailers for Kingdom of the Spiders and Frogs are not very good.
2) These three are all available to view for free on YouTube, which means I don’t have to share one library copy or waste time watching three different films in class. Fortunately, thanks to the magic of the Information Superhighway, these are not like your typical YouTube films where they’re diced up into 10-minute increments (Millenials don’t have time for that!), but rather the complete films:
3) I didn’t want any students to be at a disadvantage. Let’s say I assigned students to create a movie out of The Shawshank Redemption. Maybe some students have never seen it (for shame), but for others it might be their favorite film of all time. That really wouldn’t be fair to students who haven’t watched it (or have only watched it once). This way, all the students start out on equal ground: They’ve never seen any of these films.
So I assigned this project and, a couple of weeks later, I had a dropbox filled with movie files.
These were my student trailers that really stood out. Even when there were some imperfections, I could still tell what the students were going for.
This first trailer is for Planet of Dinosaurs and it’s pretty straightforward, but he does a great job using the movie’s dialogue with music from a few different movies:
This next trailer is from the movie Frogs, which is a 1970s movie about man v. nature where nature fights back! Again, an overall solid piece where she incorporates great scenes from the movie with a good use of dialogue. The music is a bit familiar, but I think it works:
This next one was inspired by the fantastic Watchmen trailer. This is another trailer for Kingdom of the Spiders, this time with music. I appreciated the creativity. As you can see, the music fits and, at times, synchs up perfectly:
And this last one is also a Kingdom of the Spiders trailer (they just couldn’t get enough of the Shat!). He used the eerie music from the excellent, wildly depressing Requiem for a Dream. I wish the editing would have gotten crazier and more frantic as the music took off, but I love what he was going for here and thought the trailer was excellent:
The assignment served its purpose. I’ll be honest–the students weren’t thrilled about watching the actual movies (I’ll have to teach them to appreciate movies ironically), but they had a good time editing down the movies, exercised some creativity, and are completely comfortable with the editing software. I’m considering it a mission accomplished!
Newspaper Cutbacks
Personally, I cannot stand all the talk about the “death of newspapers” that continues to reverberate across various forms of media. Don’t get me wrong–the newspapers have been fighting hard against the idea of adapting to the changing landscape and they’ve botched this whole process in a number of ways. That said, let’s all just take a deep breath and calm down. Newspapers are still going to be around. They might appear in a different form (probably longer, more in-depth pieces, like a magazine), they’ll have to market themselves differently (to appeal to young non-readers), and they definitely need a way to utilize, and not just use, new media (and when I say  utilize, having a reporter read their story into a webcam is not utilizing…it’s also not interesting).
All that aside, it’s still a rough time because, at the end of the day, newspapers are businesses, and the economic situation is…well…less than ideal. I saw this and found it disturbing–we hear about layoffs here and there, but to see it laid out on Front Street is a little unnerving.