NM/SL 10 – Hunger Games Trailer Reflection

My Opinion of the Novel

The book is an interesting one. It is a dystopian novel, although it has, classic, fantasy undertones. I say this because in most high fantasy books, some seemingly insignificant person (who happens to be the main character) ends up being thrust into some grand (or scary or thrilling) adventure. This happens in many great books, The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter and The Eye of the World. (Though now that I say it, most good books start this way). Not many countries in the world right now fit the dystopian theme if you look at them at face value. Pretty much only like North Korea and maybe Ukraine. But what really characterizes a dystopia is the suffering going on, and I think today there’s a lot of people with hidden suffering. A lot of internal turmoil. I think that this caused mainly by our technology and how it can spread ideas. Whereas a lot of the turmoil in the districts in Panem is caused by the lack of access to technology. For example, they don’t have electricity all the time, they don’t have a water boiler, there are basically no jobs that can be provided because there is an abundance of technology and so most people have to work physically draining jobs to buy food, and they can’t really buy a lot of food with it, so many die of starvation. (I’ve written too much so I’m going to stop now)

How our trailer conveys the themes

Our trailer conveys a few different themes that are found in the book. The trailer (tries to) convey love. (We’re not very good actors and didn’t have too much time for a lot of takes because we tried to do a variety). We do this through showing scenes of Katniss and Prim which shows that they love each other, and gives Katniss a real reason and desperation to win and go back to her family. It also shows the connection between Katniss and Prim (and therefore the theme “trust”), which helps you empathize with Katniss, and want to see what happens to her. We also allude to the theme love with clips from Gale and Katniss interacting and Peeta and Katniss interacting. Throughout the trailer we also convey the theme of survival by showing different people running after one another in the forest. These people running makes us assume that something bad is going to happen when one person or whatever else is chasing them catches up to them. This survival theme is also shown when Ryan almost falls on me.

How the Curricular Competencies are Shown

We showed a few different Curricular Competencies during this project.

Thinking I wrote most of the script so I had to figure out how to make a trailer. It took me a lot of the weekend because writing creatively usually takes me a long time, because I have to think of new ideas and that takes me a while. I watched a couple videos on guidelines on how to make a trailer . We all watched the trailer together as well, so when we were brainstorming scene ideas we had to make sure we weren’t subconsciously copying the trailer. We also did a lot of creative thinking to find good parts of the book to include that would be interesting but also actually possible to fill.

Communicating – We communicated during the brainstorming process. This was through talking about our ideas, listening to each other and giving our thoughts about each other’s ideas. We also communicated about which props we’d need, who would bring them and who would do each role. I tried to communicate to my group mates about what scenes we were going to do using the script but that didn’t really work.

Personal/Social – Part of the reason we didn’t really follow the script was because I didn’t want to come across as a control freak or a jerk. It could just also be that I don’t really like confronting people very much. Which is definitely something that I’m going to have to do in the future, so I’m going to have to get better at that.