Re-cut Movie Trailers
Affiliated Project: This activity may be useful for Project III, when students are adapting their second projects into new genres. It may also function well at the beginning of the course when introducing students to the concept of genres and the way we’re using it.
Purpose: This exercise familiarizes students with the concept of genre and how it’s being used in the 2135 classroom. It helps them draw on their own familiarity with genres in popular culture and what they already know about genres, conventions, and rhetorical strategies. Finally, it gets them thinking about the differences between content and conventions and what has to be altered/left out of content in order to shape it into a new genre with a different purpose/audience.
Description: Choose in advance several re-cut movie trailers to show during class (typing Re-Cut Movie Trailers into YouTube will yield plenty of results). From there, you might discuss genre, conventions, audience expectations, rhetorical strategies, etc. You might also ask students questions based on their understanding of the movie trailer genre, about reshaping content, etc.
Suggested Time: 15 – 20 minutes (can be extended)
Procedure: Choose in advance several re-cut movie trailers to show during class. Here are links to some that have worked well in the past, but typing Re-Cut Movie Trailers into YouTube will yield plenty of results:
Here are some I use:
From there, you might discuss genre, conventions, audience expectations, rhetorical strategies, etc. You might also ask students questions based on their understanding of the movie trailer genre (e.g. What cues are there that tell them what kind of film it is?), about reshaping content (e.g. What has to be left out in order to make Mary Poppins a scary movie?), etc. Many of the conventions are purposely violated -- how does the subversion of genre conventions create a new kind of meaning?
If you wish to extend the activity to a full class period, you can have students work in groups to choose a film, re-write the trailer for a different genre, and then explain the choices they made. If they have computers or tablets, they can look up clips and decide how to re-work them.