The Memory Project: Maus Book Trailer
When we first started this project, I was a bit intimidated. A book trailer?? How are we gonna do that with the materials we have? I wasn’t sure how it would all work out. But as we got through the project, wrote the screenplay, created the storyboard, and eventually got to filming, everything really came together.
First we looked at the purpose of a trailer, so that we could understand that aspect of the project. We determined what we see in professional trailers and how we can use these techniques when creating our own.
After that, we needed to learn about WW2, picking up where we left off in our last project! To learn about the causes of this war our class was given an assignment using iMovie, where we would make a slideshow of images, and use transitions, fitting music, and a voiceover, to successfully inform someone about the causes of WW2.
This assignment was also beneficial to the end project, by helping us become familiar with the iMovie app since we needed it to eventually edit the book trailer.
After reading about about Canada’s involvement in WW2, we put together a short podcast in GarageBand discussing it. We researched and discussed in class for the podcast’s content, and then wrote a script so that we knew what to say. In the podcast we were asked to talk about the causes and consequences of Canada entering the war. After recording our story, we used GarageBand’s live loops, instruments, and other tools to create a track that goes with our story.
Throughout these assignments we had also been reading books about the holocaust. We got to choose out of three books, And depending on what book we chose we got put into groups. I chose a book called Maus by Art Spiegelman, and I was in a group with Izzy, Kiyaan, and Fraser. During this project we would meet up with our groups every week to discuss the book. These were called book chats and we also had a special role that was different each week. Here are the roles
1. Smart Summarizer
• Your job is to write and share a summary of the last portion of the book.
2. Discussion Director
• Your job comes after the Summarizer. After the summary is discussed, introduce some thought provoking discussion questions for your group.
3. Creative Connector
• Your job is to find and record connections between the book and the outside work. This means connecting the reading to: your own life, other stories, other people, etc.
4. Artful Artist
• Your job is to visually depict anything about this section of the story that you found important, impactful, or engaging.
for our first book chat I was the Artful Artist and below is the paragraph and drawing I made.
Over the next couple weeks we didn’t complete many separate assignments since the book chats and reading took up a lot of time. So instead of assignments we just learned more about WW2 in class. We learned about Dunkirk, The European Theatre, Operation Barbarossa, and Pearl Harbour.
one of the small assignments we did during this time was a WW2 poster. The poster was supposed to encourage some aspect of the war. Here is mine! Mine is supposed to be recruiting nurses for WW2.
For our second book chat I was the Smart Summarizer and here is my summary for chapters 3-4 of Maus
And for the third book chat I was the discussion director where I had to come up with questions related to the chapters we read. Here are the questions I came up with
Maus Discussion Directer ch 5-6
As the end of our books approached, we practiced making music and a storyboard for the trailer, and then when everyone finished their books (including the other groups), we made an “initial brainstorm” and then the screenplay! Fraser wrote most of the screenplay, and then me and Izzy converted it into the storyboard. To make the storyboard we used keynote. Below is the link to the storyboard.
The last part of our big project was filming and editing the trailer for Maus. First we needed to create a call sheet. This is a document that shows when and where we’re going to film, the costumes and props needed, and who’s playing each character.
Once the call sheet was finished we were ready to film! Earlier on in the project we had discussed different filming techniques, such as different shots, camera angles, etc. And we used this knowledge to try to film our trailers so that they could look as professional as possible.
Our teacher gave us time during class to begin filming our trailers. My group filmed in the woods, field, and in the baseball diamond in myrtle park. We were only able to film a tiny portion of our scenes at school since a lot of our scenes needed to be filmed inside.
On the weekend my group met at Izzy’s house to film the rest of our scenes, and we used my phone to film because it has better quality than the iPads. It took about an hour and a half to get everything done, with all the costume changes and locations.
Izzy was in charge of editing most of it, since she wanted to get it done while at home and it’s hard to edit together anyways. The app she was using crashed and we lost everything but at the last minute we managed to get it all together. So now we had our first draft finished of our trailer, and here’s that
We handed this in to get any feedback on how we could’ve improved the trailer. The main suggestions were making shots longer, adding a title screen, reviews, and opening dates. We also needed to work on music in GarageBand.
After all of our changes were made we were ready to hand in, and then show our trailer to the class and teacher. Here is the official Maus book trailer by Art Spiegelman
At the end of the day we were proud of this, but my group did think we could’ve done better. When showing it to the class we did think that some of the other groups trailers were more impressive than ours. We still were proud though, as we put a lot of work into it.
Now for the driving question. How can stories of survival deepen our understandings of WWll? The book Maus is about a son interviewing his father about his life experiences. It’s made up of a bunch of little stories that encompass what his life was. He was a holocaust survivor. While we had to make this into a fun project, we still had to read these gruesome and terrifying stories of his survival in WWll. I think this project helped deepen my understanding of just how intense and brutal WWll was. Being my age, and living in Canada, not having experienced any war at all, it can be hard to wrap my head around. I think this project was the perfect way to teach these stories, while still learning how to use software like iMovie and GarageBand which are valuable skills.
Reading books like these about war and tragedy, just make me more determined that we need to keep peace in this world, so that nobody ever has to experience anything like Art Spiegelman’s father had to.