Monday, January 26, 2015

Movie Trailer Critique




Hello my loyal followers... or whoever reads these. Hellooo fellow G.T students, and of course Mr. Sanderl. I'm very sorry for the lack of posts, as many of you guys know, it was winter break! Since Christmas is a time for spending time with family and friends, I tried to connect with humans more than screens. Impressive, I know. Comment below with what you did this break, and if your glad to be coming back! I have mixed feelings... Anyway, today's post is, if you hadn't guessed by the title, a critique of our last project in Mr. Sanderl's class before the break- Movie Trailers! If this is your first time reading a blog post, and if your not in a K.M.S GT class, then you should head over to the post all about the project, I'll link it below.

This project was really fun! We wrote, filmed, and edited our own movie trailers with teams of four. (Team will be linked below... check their blogs out!) Our trailer was at first a murder mystery, but do to the audience we were supposed to be gearing it to- 1st graders- we made it a comedic take on a mystery. It's about a young society dame who's amethyst ring is stolen. She and her friend the detective must find the ring before it's to late. If you want more information, check out the links below to see my other post about it, and of course my wonderful teams take. My teammates were all seventh graders this time around, and they are all good friends of mine. I felt we worked really well together despite the tension and pressure that working under a deadline inevitably brings. We all had really good ideas, and we tried to use as many as we could, but it's impossible to use all of them. Despite that, we pulled it together in time, and finished with an extra point on our finished projects, bringing all of our class averages up.


Our trailer's success I credit to our trailer plan's flexibility. We would be filming a scene, and one of us would, like, jump up and be like, "Oh, I have such a great idea." We did our plan in a way that made it easy to change, and thanks to Google Drive, we were able to check it constantly. I narrated our video, so I wrote most of the voice acting script and snyopsis, with help from Talia, and Arianna and Kasiah mainly worked on writing the script. We all contributed equally with the plan, and I think our movie reflects the plan almost perfectly. We got a little lazy with changing the plan towards the end, but their close enough. I actually had swim practice on the first day we filmed, so I had to miss most of the filming that day. I felt so bad, but they did great, and the next two times we filmed I was there, loud opinions and all. We all contributed to our team's success, and clicked as a team, and that was a major factor in our sucess.

The project requirements consisted of length, and technical things. All together, it needed to be about 1:30- 2:30. Technical requirements consisted of having five scenes, a voice actor, dialogue, foley, text layovers, and our Movie Posters. We ended up using Kasiah's, which you can see by heading over to her blog, or checking out the video at the top of the page. (Please, Please, Please check it out- it's funny, and won't disappoint, even though it is geared to a younger audience. It will also make this post a little clearer.) If you would like to see mine- you do, it's fabulous- check out my Movie Posteine, I lor post, linked at the bottom. We had quite a lot of scenes, so that was a breeze. I was the voice actor, and that was really fun. Our characters were creative, and their dialogue explains them, and gives them life. We had foley, which I will link an explanation of at the bottom, of typewriters, thuds, doors slamming, and screams. Our text layovers, were, well, text layovers. You can check them out below. (Shameless video advertisement) We did complete all the requirements, and even went a little further, which earned us great grades!

Our class critique is always my favorite part of the video process. I love seeing other people's finished work. On the other hand though, I get incredible anxiety about other people seeing my work, so sometimes it's not as fun. Our video was fairly critiqued, and we did very well. I don't know why, but for some reason I thought we would get marked down. However, that was apparently just nerves, because we did great! I do agree with the results, we did a lot better than I thought we would. I like hearing my work critiqued, it helps me improve my skills, and makes me a better film maker.

Movie Poster Promo!
Kasiah, Talia, and Arianna's blogs!
Foley