Reflection: An Old Trailer

*UPDATE: Hi all! I have a brief message in regards to the link for the Ferris Bueller trailer that I made below, that being, that the link is broken. Unfortunately, the channel that I uploaded my trailer to got deleted, meaning that my trailer got deleted as well. I am looking to see if there are any ways to get my trailer back, but for now, you will just have to trust my analysis. Thank you all, and sorry for the technical issues!*

Hello everyone!

I decided to change up my fourth activity for the week. I was originally going to post a new video today, but I am still not happy with where the current video is at right now. Sadly it is not ready for sharing yet. However, this new change is super fun for me because it allows me to reconnect with one of my favorite movies of all time: Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986). I have seen this movie a countless number of times and I have actually even written about it on this blog before!

In this article I am going to share a video that I made that was inspired from this movie. My goal was to make a trailer for a movie but use the pre-existing clips and sound-bytes to push the movie in a completely different direction. This was quite difficult, but this old video is probably one of my favorite movies that I have ever made. The link is in the caption of the picture below!

So, why am I bringing this old video back? Well, I wanted to see how my skills have changed and progressed since I made this video. I have read a lot of books, watched a lot of videos, and (of course) observed a lot more movies since I produced this video. Let’s see how I would critique this video!

To begin, I’ll start with the audio. I still love the sad piano music I added in the background, I think it does a great job of setting the mood and also being a bit of a comedic factor for those who actually know the real plot of the movie. I produced this video on IMovie and the only way that I knew how to capture sound for these clips was to use the voiceover feature. Thank goodness, I have now figured out a way to convert the sound from the video over to mp3 and it makes life A LOT easier (and it makes the sound clearer too!). It is still very time consuming to link up the audio and the video in IMovie, but definitely doable.

I noticed that in this video I used a lot of Titles between clips. I still haven’t found a great way to get a narrator’s voice in my movies (I just don’t feel like mine is precise enough), so I understand why I did and still do use titles in them. Hopefully I can figure out a permanent solution to this someday (I just need to find someone with a great narrators voice lol)! I believe that the titles did work pretty well with this video however because the didn’t interrupt the serious tone of it.

Next: the footage. I loved this project simply because there was already footage out there, I just had to go find it. This gave me a lot more time in pre-production, post-production, and editing (even though I didn’t call those phases that back then). I love the shots that I picked because I think that they were the most serious in this heavily comedic film. I also loved them because they all portrayed such a deep and passionate emotion, all that I had to do was place them in a certain order and in front of a certain score so that they could purposefully convey it. I am still really proud of this part!

All in all, I am still really proud of this trailer I made. It makes me smile (even though it is most definitely not a funny trailer) because I know how much work I put into it. This trailer was really the embodiment of hard work pays off to me. I shared it with one of my film classes from a while ago and they all loved it. Let me know what y’all thought of this film in the comments! Thanks for checking in!