In humanities for the past few weeks, we have been reading young adult books and creating our own trailers to showcase them. I chose to read the book Simon vs the Homo Sapiens Agenda, and I am very pleased with how my video turned out. Our driving question for this unit was “How do authors use text to teach us more about ourselves?” This was one of the first projects this year that I fully enjoyed creating and was consistently interested in it.
The storyline for this book is about a character named Simon, a teenage boy who is hiding the fact that he’s gay from his friends and family. This was a very entertaining book, and I finished the entire second half in one sitting. I would recommend this book to almost anyone looking for a cute book with a happy ending.
The next step of this project was to start to plan out what we were going to film. We cast Kai as the main character Simon. I played Leah, one of Simon’s friends. We filmed over the course of two weeks, filming both in class and out. Most of the scenes we were able to film in and around the school, however we had a couple of scenes, such as a Halloween party, that we had to film outside of class time. The majority of scenes were very easy to film, and turned out looking very good. We did have some trouble finding the right people to play characters, due to being in a group with only 1 boy for a story which was centered on male characters. Next time, I think that I would want to figure out who was to play which characters earlier on instead of choosing right before filming.
Luca was in charge of editing out video and I think that she did a great job. We created a first draft, but it included copyright music so we had to change it. Therefore, I only have our final draft to share. We didn’t change much more than that though.
Overall, I am very proud of this project and am very pleased with how our video turned out.