A good way to summarize a movie (or book!) is with a trailer. You know, those are the annoying ads for other movies that play for like 1/2 hour before the movie that you actually paid to see. Wait, here’s one now!

The job of the trailer is to give people a taste of what the movie is like. It takes some of the best parts of the movie and presents brief clips, as well as sets up the story for people who might be interested in seeing it. While it may look easy, it’s actually quite difficult to sum up an entire movie in 1-2 minutes. You have to give a real sense of the tone of the movie, a brief plot summary, introduce the major characters and conflicts, and more. It can be difficult, but also a lot of fun!

If movie making is your thing, you could have a lot of fun with this. If you’re not so technologically minded, it could be tough.

Some tips/requirements:

• You don’t necessarily need clips from the actual movie to make this. You could use pictures or shoot your own clips (you talking, not acting out the movie…). Your job is to retell the story and give a good sense of what the movie is like. The visuals for this assignment don’t matter quite as much.
• If you are using pictures from the Internet MAKE SURE THAT THEY ARE HIGH QUALITY! Nothing is worse than seeing a video with really grainy, low quality pictures. And DO NOT USE PICTURES WITH WATERMARKS! That looks STUPID!

Low quality, pixelated photo! YUCK!

Good grief! NO!

• Use appropriate, good quality music.
• If you’re using iMovie (which I personally hate) MAKE SURE YOU TURN OFF THE KEN BURNS EFFECT! If you don’t know that what that is, don’t use iMovie! Ken Burns makes me seasick. Turn it off or I will hate your video!