Napoleon Dynamite Trailer Remake

The Assignment: 

Remake a movie trailer that takes place inside of a school. Shot for Shot/Edit for Edit. We were to analyze shots, and advanced camera work and advanced editing. 

Pre-Production:

Planning this project had to be my favorite part of the entire thing. We started by choosing a movie, and story boarding. My group and I chose Napoleon Dynamite, and from there we took screenshots of every different shot throughout the trailer, and wrote about camera direction, locations, and character lists/costumes. We planned on doing a lot of the filming outside of the school day because it would be easiest to get these shots when no one was in the building. Along with that, we took the time to recreate the animated shots of moving words using illustrator. 

Production: 

Production turned out to be a bit more difficult than we originally anticipated. We found ourselves redoing shots a couple times because a line would be messed up, or the camera was positioned wrong, just minor details just like that. Much of the filming was done in one day, at various locations. We shot the film at my house as well as Olathe Northwest. We were unable to find a school with a tetherball still out on the playground available for us to use which resulted in is changing a couple things in the trailer, but all and all the filming experience was a lot of fun. 

Post-Production: 

Editing was found to be easier than normal project because all we had to do was take our shot and put it in order with the original trailer. When editing, we ran into little problems such as Ryan talks a bit slower than Napoleon does in the Original Trailer which is why you will notice the left side of the screen goes blank every once in a while. We also noticed that because we do not have colored lockers in our schools, the shots are not as visually appealing in our trailer as they are in the original trailer. 

What I learned: 

With this, I learned that you should not underestimate all the work that actually goes into a trailer. There is a lot more work to it, than say a new story, or a music video. Aside from that, everything seemed to be very smooth. I had a great group to work with and we had a lot of fun making this. It kept us laughing which was the nice thing, it made the filming seem easier. We did however have to work around the fact we were unable to get a Pedro actor with us when we were filming outside of school, as well as the fact there was no school with a tetherball or a car with hydraulics at our dispense.  

What I would change vs. What I would keep the same: 

If I had the chance to redo it again, I would make sure we were able to get all of the actors we needed at one time that way we could get all the shots needed instead of having to change shots to make it work with our trailer. I would also probably change the location inside of the school to a place with better lighting for the inside shots, or even find a location with more color inside the school because the grey lockers make it look a bit dull inside the trailer. 

General Thoughts/Conclusion: 

From this project, I will most definitely take away how important analyzing shots are. Things like lighting, dialogue emphasis, as in getting the actor to speak at the same pace as the original actor. I will also take away the importance of planning and making sure you have everyone together and all your actors/actresses in order because having then cancel last minute seemed to cause a little bit of panic. Nevertheless, the project was a very fun and meaningful experience. While we ran into some complications, and maybe Ryan would have enjoyed a different trailer choice, I probably wouldn't change anything because I do felt like Lilly, Ryan, and I bonded a bit on making this since there were so many last minute changes. 

Typographic Use

These past couple weeks in graphic design we have done a lot of work with typography, color schemes, and how we can make these things fit with one another. To the side you will see my final four quotes, as in what I presented to my class. 

1. "If you want to life yourself up, life someone else up." - Booker T. Washington

I chose this quote because it was one that I feel really relates to high school students. We all have bad days at some point, and instead of bringing other down with you the best thing to do is to make your day better by helping out someone else, or making their day better. 

2. "Life is Short, the World is Wide" - Simon Raven 

I chose this quotes because personally I am not a "Go with the flow" kinda gal, but sometimes I have to tell myself that no mater what happens, I can only control the things that are in my poor to control and I should not spend all my time worrying about things I can not control. 

3. "The virtue lies in the struggle, not the prize." - Richard Monckton Milnes

I chose this quote because I felt as if it went well with everything going on in our graphic design class at the moment. Everyone just wants to get to the finish, but we have to really work at the things we want in life, which means doing things we do not like, numerous times. 

4. "Don't worry about failures, worry about the chances you miss when you don't even try" - Jack Canfield

I chose this quote because I felt that is also really spoke to me and little things going on in my life as we are wrapping up sophomore year in these last nine weeks. 

The process of these quotes started with 4 5x5 art boards where we placed these four quotes in black and white only and figured out the placement of words and what typography worked best with which quote and or words. From there we learned in depth about color schemes and how they play off of one another. We copied out black and white, and put different types of color themes on them. We used color.adobe.com to find all the color schemes which is what you will see at the top of the next document. The labels underneath explain which scheme was used.

Disclaimer: The next image has a duplicate of the first four because it was used on my behind account. 

After we finished creating all the art boards, we presented to our class and they gave us feedback. I was told numerous things about my work.

1. They were very liked, everything went well together. 

2. I had good use of spacing throughout my quotes. My negative space worked really well with all my quotes. 

3. My typography worked really well with my quotes, I was able to emphasize all the correct words, and create flow throughout the quotes. 

4. The sizing of different words, as well as the shapes/backgrounds placed in the quotes made them very visually appealing and fun to look at. 

Person feedback to myself consisted of one thing, my "Virtue...Struggle...Quote" could have been so much better, and I am well aware of that. For future reference, I know that I have a lot of creative ability, and if I can't think of anything to do with the quote, choosing a new one is always an option. 

In conclusion, this project was very interesting. We worked a lot with typography in freshman year, and personally I thought of it as frustrating then because there were so many options and no structure. This time, we were told things like how we were to not use more than two fonts, maybe three max, but a play on words was always an option to make it more visually appealing. I was able to learn a lot and how different typefaces and colors can work with one another.