Digital literacy – persuasive movie trailers.

Digital Literacy – Persuasion
Creating Movie Trailers using Kahootz
Kevin Cummins

Selling an idea
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
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)

Watch some movie Trailer Sites
Below are some sites that contain movie trailers.
http://www.moviefone.com/movie-trailers
http://movies.yahoo.com/
http://www.clevver.com/movie-trailers.html
*Please ensure the content your students are viewing is age appropriate.

Elements of a trailer
When watching some trailers try to identify the following elements.
Who are 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 should you know from the trailer?
What style or genre is the film?
Key Characters
Major Stars (if neccesary)
Locations or Setting
Mood (ie: fast, slow, dark, happy)
A rough idea of the plot

Your Task
Now that you have identified some of the key elements of movie trailers you are going to create a film trailer of either a narrative of your own or you may wish to make your own trailer of your favourite film or book. 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.

Kahootz
We are going to use Kahootz to do this task. Here are some tutorials if you are a little unsure of how to use it. If Kahootz is not an option you might wish to try some online options such as.
GoAnimate
Animoto
Photostory 3
All of these platforms allow for the integration of images, voice over and music to enhance your final product. 2:30 is probably quite an ambitious length for a student and I would recommend aiming for around a minute.

Sharing your movie with others
Once you have created your movie trailer it would be great to share them with others from either simply putting them up on your interactive whiteboard through to posting it on Youtube.
Good Luck!

http://www.edgalaxy.com	1397
http://teachers.sd43.bc.ca	8
http://teachit.squarespace.com	2
http://static.slidesharecdn.com	1
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com	1

Digital literacy – persuasive movie trailers.

by Kevin Cummins on Sep 06, 2010

Accessibility

Categories

Tags

Upload Details

Usage Rights

5 Embeds 1,409

Statistics

Digital literacy – persuasive movie trailers. — Presentation Transcript