Movie Trailer Review

Assignment: Recreate the trailer of a movie that takes place in a high school. The goal was to create the trailer line for line and scene for scene. We chose the movie The DUFF, which is about a girl named Bianca, who discovers she's considered the DUFF (Dumb, Ugly, Fat Friend) in her friend group.

As always, this project had to start somewhere. We used a really cool website called Celtx.com to write our script. The storyboard took a bit longer because I had to find the trailer on YouTube and it watch it in slo-mo in order to screen-shot every camera change. After I had all my screen-shots, I put them in order in a word document. I then went through the word document and typed out all the details for each shot such as, characters feature, the shot size and movements, and the time each shot is held. During this time, we also cast our video, which was done mostly by Mackenzie Jefferson.

Because our trailer has so many shots in a variety places, it was very complicated to shoot. Another complication came from our actors. Many of them aren't in class with us, so trying to coordinate everyone was hard and involved a lot of back and forth between place in the school. In the end, we were able to get it filmed, but just barely.

 The last part of the process is editing. This was the hardest part for me because it was when I realized we were missing some of our shots. Luckily, with some creativity, we were able to make a sufficient trailer with what we had. Editing was also really complicated just because it's the last part and we were pressed for time. 9 times out of 10, the way you film something during production affects the editing  process. My team only used one camera which caused us to do scenes several times to get all our shots, this made for a jumpier editing job between lines.

Overall, I believe that this by far not my best project, there is lots of room for improvement.

Watch the trailer below: