Ever since they were invented, novels have wowed, engaged, and inspired readers across the globe. They not only provide great entertainment but teach us important facts and lessons. To kick off our year in humanities, our class dove into some great examples of youth literarture. These books include Simon vs the Homosapien Agenda, More Happy Than Not, Don’t Get Caught, and The Perks of Being a Wallflower. Through reading these books along with working on video assignments, we were able to turn these stories into cinematic trailers and find answers to our driving question “How do Authors use Text to Teach us More About Ourselves?”

Read and Reshoot – Our Unit

We began our unit by choosing one of the aforementioned books to read. I chose The Perks of Being a Wallflower, along with Jessie and Marshall.It is a coming of age story which follows a socially reserved boy named Charlie and his journey through high school. I found it was a great book because it addressed many serious issues in which teens face in a realistic way. It also is told in an epistolary format which helps make it seem as if it were actually happening. The author, Stephen Chbosky uses this realism to help engage us in the book and teach us a lesson about the importance of accepting help from others.

The Perks of Being A Wallflower Official Movie Trailer – Minor Spoilers

Our teacher gave us the task to be finished a portion of the book each week, and then do a challenge relating to it with our groups. These challenges ranged from creating a video in our groups to writing responses, all of which helped sharpen the skills which we would be using in the next part of our unit. One challenge that stood out was the Authors Voice Video. It was a simple assignment; we were tasked with writing a brief video biography on our books’s author. By researching about our authors, we learned about their inspirations, personalities, and motives, all of which are reflected in their works. These factors influence how we perceive their words and how we take in the messages they are trying to convey. This exercise also helped us better understand the tone of our books, which was useful for the next part of our project.

My Author’s Voice Video

Our Character Sketch Video Assignment

The Big Picture – Our Trailers

Our first big project in this unit was to create a spoiler free trailer of our book. Following the story structure, it would start off introducing the characters and the setting, gradually intensify, reach the climax, and then fall back to a calm point. It also had to include studio and title cards, text cards, music, and and good camera work. We started off by making a trailer template. Similar to the ones in iMovie, our templates would give a rough idea of the shots, dialogue, and music we would use. This is were we found the right mood for the trailer; somewhere in between melancholy and hopeful.

My Individual Trailer Template

Our Group Trailer Template

The next step was to make a filming plan. Having a small group actually helped in this stage because we had less to coordinate. Being a high school novel, we planned to film mostly at Seycove with Jessie’s house being the set for any other scenes. At first, we didn’t take our schedule too seriously. We would film a shot here and there assuming we could get them all done in time. The first due date crept up on us however, and on the date of presentation we were missing some key shots. Our trailer still looked pretty good and captured the mood we were going for, but the lack of shots left it feeling incomplete.

After a peer critique session it was back to the drawing boards for Trailer Draft 2. To figure out what we could do to make it better, I thought about our driving question, how do authors use text to teach us about ourselves? In The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Stephen Chbosky teaches us the importance of accepting help through the use of character description and emotion in Charlie’s letters. Thinking about this, we decided that our trailer needed more emotional and character driven shots. This time we stuck closely to our schedule and filmed filmed tons of B-roll whenever we could. We planned more complex shots, such as one where Jessie would be standing in a driving car looking through the sun roof. We also thought about how it’s the progress that Charlie makes which turns his letters into a story, and used this as the focus of our story spine. With this and a lot of editing, we were able to improve our trailer and produce our final draft.

Our Final Trailer

Bloopers

Reflection

I’m still in disbelief that I’m already in grade 10, but the work we are producing is really showing our progress since grade 8. I felt that everyone was willing to put in the effort needed to complete the harder tasks, and that the overall level of quality feels much higher than it did in last years videos. I’m proud of some of the the shots we were able to get, because scenes such as the fight scene and car scene took a lot of coordination. The use of music in our trailer is also a highlight as it’s mixed to line up with the scenes perfectly.

I still feel group work can be a challenge especially if not everyone has the same vision for the final product. I also found bringing the right emotion into scenes is not an easy task, but overall we were able to make it work and create a great trailer. As for our driving question, I feel that authors mainly use text to inspire and connect with us. I feel that if we were told to make a trailer for our book and hadn’t read it, even if someone told us all the details, our trailers wouldn’t be the same. It’s the use of words, emotion, and timing that the author used which allowed us to understand the true meaning of our book. That is how I think authors use text to teach us about ourselves.