For my final DS106 project I really wanted to go out with a bang and by bang I mean including explosions! My storytelling theme is “Through the Eyes of a Toddler” so I knew I wanted to do a video and make it epic. When I came across the project to make a movie trailer I got really excited because I knew immediately I wanted to make an epic superhero movie trailer with my daughter and her friends. The next step was to figure out how many of Ashlyn’s friends could join us so I knew how many super heroes to plan for. In the end two of Ashlyn’s friends were not only willing to join us but they already had super hero outfits too! One friend would be playing the part of batman and the other superman. I assumed my daughter would want to be batgirl but she ended up saying wonder woman which really helped me out because batgirl hasn’t been filmed a ton and she is a red head and my daughter has very dark brown hair.
Now that I had a basic idea of what characters I wanted for the movie trailer it was time to start finding some movie clips from other movies to include in mine. I started brainstorming about my favorite scenes in movies from the 90’s batman movies all the way to movies that currently have only released a trailer. I compiled a huge list of movies and downloaded clips from YouTube onto my computer and then uploaded them into My Movie. I went through each video and clipped to only the best scenes in each one. For the batman character I am really not a fan of Ben Affleck’s version of batman so I tried to incorporate some more old school batman into the videos. After I got the videos together I started searching for the audio. I wanted to do an epic mashup of classic movie trailer sounds such as the “angry boat” noise and explosions throughout the video too.
To really make a great trailer I started thinking more about what makes a great movie trailer and came up with a list. A great movie trailer has intense music, explosions, at least one running scene, voice overs from Don LaFontaine (the “In a world…” guy) and quick shots of the characters in the movie. So far I had some explosions, intense music and a few video clips I could use for the quick shots. Next, we needed the stars of the show, the toddlers in some fun videos. We headed off to the park where my daughter essentially played super heroes with her friends and I took video of them. My favorite parts were the shots of video where the wind picked up and their capes were flowing in the wind.
The hardest part of this project was all of the editing. I used My Movie to create the movie and every time I added audio in one section it seemed to move all of the other sections. I probably spent at least 5 hours alone on audio. Creating the video took several hours each day for three days to complete and I could still tweak it for probably months to get it to the point of perfection. Perhaps that is a good example of why it takes years for movies to be completed! The project was really fun and my daughter not only had a blast playing at the park for the filming but also loved the final product. One thing looking back I wish I would have changed was to have more video shots of the toddlers in action. I smell a sequel in her future!
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