Study Journal Entry: Project #3 Movie Trailer

I think this movie trailer project was the most exciting and fun project we did all semester. Professor Melendez tasked us with watching one of three movies: Joker, 1917, or The Secret Life of Pets 2. I had never seen any of the movies so I was really excited when our homework assignment was to watch one of the movies not only once, but twice. After some thought, I decided on the Joker. I knew Joaquin Phoenix won the Academy Award for best actor for his role as the Joker, so I had to watch it. I will definitely watch 1917 at another time, but after watching the trailer i didn’t want to edit a war movie for an editing project, it just seemed too intense. After my first watch of Joker, I was so impressed. The story was so dynamic, it was funny, and emotional, dramatic and action filled. I watched the movie again and took some spotting notes, shown below. After watching the movie for a second time, I realized this was going to be tough to edit, because about 95% of the scenes in the movie played a part in shaping Arthur, the plot, and eventually the Joker, but I couldn't include all of that in 3 minutes.

After taking my spotting session notes, I started organizing in Premiere. Per Professor Melendez’s recommendation, I organized clips into bins based on the emotion of the scene. I organized the clips by action clips, dramatic clips, emotional clips, and so on. I also created bins for the cold open and the button, and I wanted to create some organization for beginning, middle, and end.

After all the clips were organized, I started pulling them into the timeline. I feel like this project had less to do with cutting and editing clips and more to do with creativity. This was the first project where I really got to experiment with overlapping audio and video. For example in the cold open, I placed some of Arthur’s dialogue with his therapist over the scene in the movie where Arthur is chasing down some kids for his sign. I also got to experiment with music in this project. I added some music that was in the movie soundtrack to my trailer, and I think that really brought it all together. Although the audio didn’t have to be perfect for this project, I had a lot of fun experimenting with music and overlapping audio. In the end I think my project was a little longer than an average movie trailer, but I really enjoyed being creative and re-ordering the scenes in the movie to make a brand new movie trailer.