Creating Movie Trailers using iMovie Digital Media III Mr. Reed

 Movies are not cheap to produce: For instance James Cameron’s blockbuster Avatar is reported to have cost between $300 and $500 million dollars to launch from an idea to cinema screen.  The success and failure of a film can rely heavily on the way it is promoted to the public. Hollywood puts in a great deal of effort to persuade us to part with our hard earned cash to see something we really know very little about.  The most effective way they do this is with film trailers.

 Movie trailers are snapshot of what we should expect to see in the film.  Since the purpose of the trailer is to attract an audience to the film, these excerpts are usually drawn from the most exciting, funny, or otherwise noteworthy parts of the film but in abbreviated form and without producing spoilers. For this purpose the scenes are not necessarily in the order in which they appear in the film. A trailer has to achieve that in less than two and a half minutes. Each studio or distributor is allowed to exceed this time limit once a year, if they feel it is necessary for a particular film (source: WikiPedia)(source: WikiPedia)

 Below are some sites that contain movie trailers.    

 When watching some trailers try to identify the following elements:  Who is the intended audience?  What is the key text used in the trailer?  What does the audience know?  What would you like to know more about?

 What style or genre is the film?  Key Characters  Major Stars (if necessary)  Locations or Setting  Mood (ie: fast, slow, dark, happy)  A rough idea of the plot

 Now that you have identified some of the key elements of movie trailers you are going to create a film trailer of your historical event or person. There are no limitations.  The first part of this will be to create a storyboard of what you intend to include in your trailer. Once you are clear on your idea you can move on to the production phase.

 What is a storyboard? Click herehere  Here are a few storyboard creator links or you can use paper and create your storyboard.   d/ d/  to-create-a-storyboard/ to-create-a-storyboard/  The first part of this will be to create a storyboard of what you intend to include in your trailer. Once you are clear on your idea you can move on to the production phase.

 You will use a digital camera, Photoshop, storyboard generators, microphones, etc.  Then you will put all the aspects together into iMovie ‘11 to create a movie trailer using the movie trailer feature.

 Once you have created your movie trailer it would be great to share them with others from either simply putting them up on our school website or posting it on Youtube.Youtube.  Good Luck!