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.ht

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*Please ensure the content your students are viewing is age appropriate.

ELEMENTS OF A TRAILERWhen 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!