Trailer Madness, or, How I Spent My Summer

Late last night, the Very Young Artists finished up their massive project: a shot-for-shot remake of the trailer for The Last Jedi.
\
For comparison, here's the actual trailer.



Back when I was a kid, we spent our summers trying to come up with ideas for secret clubs, or running around barefoot outside. The youth nowadays are more sophisticated. It helps, of course, to be massively organized, have a lot of siblings and spare time, and be able to ride herd on recalcitrant actors. All the kids (and the neighbor) are here except the 4.5yo, because that's a hard age.


Filmmaking is a lot of work! Sitting here by me on the desk is a clipboard with detailed filming info: number of shots in the trailer, length of shot, who's in each shot, lines, props, etc. Some of the filming was done in January, so our Rey was shivering outside wrapped in a huge jacket between takes. (Note, also, the three modes of Rey: Rey, Big Rey, and Mini-Rey.) This weekend's big filming push, which yielded 30 of the 80+ shots, involved sprinkler work, clear fishing line, Lego construction, painting, color editing, greenscreen editing, voiceovers, a forgotten pair of glasses, and trying to coax the baby to reach out his hands. (I'm reminded of something I read about filming little Kirsten Dunst's scenes in Interview with the Vampire, which involved isolated bits of getting a reaction from a child with appropriate techniques like "think of your dead pet", which were then edited together with other shots to give those bits of acting a very different final slant for the movie.)


I'm impressed by the ingenuity the kids showed in finding filming locations, making backgrounds, approximating scenes for which they couldn't match the special effects (a quantity of ground red chalk went into the making of this film), and learning about color editing and voice-overs. Everything was shot on location in our house or in the yard, and the costumes were found in our closets or sewn in our own costume shop. The props are courtesy of our lightsaber/Lego collection. We did buy the trailer music, but almost everything else is homegrown.


Starting up school again is going to be such a drag, even though I'm nowhere near as focused a taskmaster as the 14yo director.