When a new movie is being made it is very common that they make a trailer for the film. But you never get a trailer for a new book. A lot of the time you don’t even get much notice of when it’s coming out. Don’t you think it would be cool to watch a trailer for a book before it comes out?

Oh, what’s this? A trailer for the book, The Perks of being a Wallflower by Steven Chbosky? How did it get here and who made it? Well, I guess you should watch it and find out.

Wow how funny, I made that video. Well actually, Emily, Marshall and I made this video, and let me tell you they were amazing to work with. I learned a lot about their strength and my own from this project.

Emily is one of the best editors I know, you could give her the most scrap of footage and she would give you an amazing story. I think she really brought this video together. Marshall is an amazing actor. He did a great job as Charlie and really portrayed him just like is in the book. I learned that im really good at managing people. I was kind of the director during the project and I felt like it went really well!

The Process

Let’s go back a bit and I’ll tell you about the process of making this trailer. We always start with a driving question when we start a new unit;

How do authors use text to teach us more about oursleves?

First, we had to read the book, which is a given. I chose The Perks of Being a Wallflower because I had seen the film many times before but I had never read the book. I thought it would be good to compare the two and I learned a lot from that. Comparing the two I could understand the storyline and the choices filmmakers must make to create a good story with a nice flow.

After reading the book we started planning out the trailer. We created a google doc and started to add all the scenes we remembered and thought represented the book. The thing about a trailer is that you need to give the audience a glimpse of the storyline and the conflict without giving anything away.

Then we created a storyboard. In the long run, we didn’t use the storyboard we created but it was good practice.

Following that, I created a schedule that said when we would film which scenes. This was probably the most helpful part of this project because it meant we were always working on something instead of doing all the filming in one day.

Most of the editing was done by Emily and she did an amazing job, Im sure she talked about her process on her blog so please go check it out!

I think we worked really well together as a group. I think we had a lot of strong ideas. I learned a lot of new tricks like making a schedule that I will use in future projects. Im super proud of the final result and im really excited for people to see them.

As always thanks for checking im still in school!

Jessie