Hi blog! This lovely Tuesday I am going to be talking about one of my favorite projects ever! We started the new unit “Story of My Life” and were immediately given the choice of 5 different books to read. More Happy Than Not, Dumpling, Simon vs The Homo Sapiens Agenda, Don’t Get Caught, & Perks of Being A Wallflower.

I decided to read Simon vs The Homo Sapiens Agenda. I explain why I chose this book on my other Simon blog post linked here. My group turned out really good and the members are Maggie, Kai, Morgan, & Tamara. Check out there blogs later to see there POV of the project!

Why are we reading this book you ask? Well, our assignment was to make a movie trailer for the book with the driving question in mind.

Driving Question: How do authors use text to teach us more about ourselves?

Now I will get into breaking down the project and what I learnt from it.

PREP BEFORE VIDEO

First of all, I needed to read the book. I really enjoyed this part as I really like reading (paper copy’s only though 😊.) I’ve seen the movie for this book, and I honestly like the book storyline better. The characters were more considerate and realistic. Anyways, once done reading the book my group got to working on the trailer outline. Being honest, this step really confused me. It wasn’t a storyboard but wasn’t a script… Kai volunteered to do it. We ended up with a good outline, but very vague. We didn’t have time to make it perfect as we had to start filming! I wrote out a script for the video the night before we were filming and I was hesitantly ready to start filming…

The last thing we did before filming was watch an example of a good trailer to inspire us.

FILMING + EDITING 

We decided to use a camera as all well our favorite trailers are really good quality. If we are going to do all this why not film it on a camera? I offered to film on my moms Canon EOS 6D as I had some strong visions for the scenes we needed to film. I was excited to go out and actually make those visions real.

Going into filming, we knew Kai was going to be Simon from the start as he is the only guy in the group. Because I was the one filming I kind of got assigned automatically as the director… I was all good with that as I am good at bossing people around. I got to dress Kai! (Yes, dress him!) That was a highlight. Anyways, going into filming with only a script and some vague ideas of shots stressed me out a little at first. Getting into though, I realized the no storyboard really helped the end project be as good as it is. Most of the shots are kind of planned like me saying “Go walk around here and talk.” I wanted it to feel like candids of Simon and his friends. I would make them do whatever I asked them to for a while, so I could get authentic video of teenagers. You will see what I mean in scenes like the party scene.

Overall, filming was a success.

No one stepped up to edit… So I did it… It was pretty hard as our group had a super strong vision for the video and I really wanted to get it across. IMovie was dumb a lot of the time and liked to move around my clips which drives me mental 🙂. I found the perfect song Put the Light on – Generationals, added it… But it wasn’t copyright free so I chose a new one off YouTube.

THE VIDEO 

OK finally here is the video!

REFLECTION

This project was a total success in my books. I love the final product so much. I think my group and I did the best we could and it shows in the video. The only thing I would want to do next time is definitely spread out the work more. Being honest, I was fine with filming & editing. It was a lot of work, and it might have been nice if some other group members offered to do the editing or filming but I wouldn’t take the experience back if I could because I learnt so much. I learnt that the quality of the shots and the voiceover is what’s going to break or make a video. If you spend a long time filming and editing but don’t have a good script or shots it’s not going to reflect on the amount of time you spent working.

Last thing I’m going to point out is this… I think one of the main reasons this video is nice to watch is because of Kai! He did a really good job at acting and the voice over is really well said too. I know my group and I will be proud of this video for a while.