Play Trailer Project

Play Trailer/Close Reading: ~~Friday, January 28th by 11:59 pm~~ Sunday, January 30th by 11:59 pm
Percentage: 10%

Play Trailer Presentation: Week 4
Percentage: 5%

General Overview:

It might be easiest to think of your project as putting together a storyboard (or visual outline) of a trailer for a short film based on one of the four suffrage plays we read (Hatton’s “Before Sunrise,” Moffat’s “The Maid and the Magistrate,” Glover’s “Miss Appleyard’s Awakening,” or Cholmondeley’s “Votes for Men”). This means that while you don’t have to film anything, you will be choosing key scenes from the play to highlight, picking out actors to play the roles, showing inspiration images for the setting, and deciding on a background song. This is supposed to be fun while also making you thinking critically about the play. More guidelines are below.

Along with this storyboard/trailer, you will be responsible for writing a short 400-600 word close reading of the play you make a trailer for. This written piece will go more in-depth into the play and give you practice analyzing literature.

Finally, you will present your trailer (not the close reading, although you may borrow some elements from that portion of the project) to the class during Week 4. This presentation should only last 4-5 minutes.

Play Trailer/Close Reading - Sunday, January 30th by 11:59 pm

Play Trailer

It may help you to start this project by watching some examples of film trailers. Here’s an example of a trailer for a film based on British Suffragettes (the film is aptly titled Suffragette).

You will be using Google Slides to produce the storyboard for your play trailer.

Here are some guidelines for your play trailer storyboard:

Include a title slide with the name of the play, the author, and your name.
Include images of each of your actors (give the character name and actor’s name). This can be on one slide, but explain briefly why you’ve chosen these actors.
Include a slide with images of inspiration for the setting (most of these plays are set in one room, but feel free to have a few inspiration images). Briefly explain why you’ve chosen this setting.
Include a link to at least one song. Note that you may imagine this song to play throughout the entire trailer or only part of it and you may have a mix of songs. Be specific about what parts of the song you’d like to use and when. You should include important lyrics if there are any. Explain briefly why you’ve chosen the(se) song(s).
Decide on what the most important passages are in the play. You should include a minimum of five passages from the play (but it’s up to you how many slides each passage/scene requires). For each passage:
- Indicate the speaker(s) if the scene is made up of dialogue and then write out the dialogue/passage you’d like to include in your trailer.
- Include any important stage directions (i.e. what is happening at that moment. Again, think of this as a film trailer. Use context/any relevant stage directions from the play to help to explain how you see this passage being filmed/performed. Note that you can paraphrase stage direction if you borrow from the play, but still cite it).
- Include a representative image or images of the actor(s), setting, and/or relevant artifacts/costuming (inspiration for furniture, decor, clothing, etc.).
- Indicate what music (if any) is playing in the background of each scene and remind us of any lyrics if they’re relevant.
Decide on whether there’s a voiceover in the trailer and, if so, include what it might say in the appropriate slides (note that a voiceover is not required, but might be helpful)

A few notes:

The passages you choose for the trailer do not have to be presented in the same order as they appear in the play itself, although they can.
Link any images to their source or provide a link to image sources somewhere on the same slide. This will serve as your citation for images.
You should be quoting from the play, but when you do, include page numbers in parentheses. So: “blah, blah, blah” (451).

Here are some things I’ll be looking for:

Follows directions.
Shows professionalism (i.e. takes the assignment seriously). However, you can have some fun with this portion of the assignment, too!
Cites appropriately.
Proper mechanics; style, sentence structure, and spelling promote coherence, clarity, and credibility.

Close Reading

You will write a 400-650 word close reading essay (roughly 1.5-2 pages) about the play you made your trailer about. Remember, you must choose one of the four plays to focus on; this assignment should not discuss multiple plays, so whichever play you choose to make a trailer for will be the play you write your close reading about. Think about this carefully before beginning.

Since you chose at least five important passages from the play for your trailer, they may come up again here! That’s fine!

You can also quote or paraphrase from any of the secondary sources (those articles we’ve been reading) if you’d like, but try and focus on the play itself.

Here are some things I’ll be looking for:

A compelling, debatable, and interpretive thesis statement.
An organized argument. In other words, there is a logic or rationale for the arrangement of paragraphs and the ideas within paragraphs relate to your argument/thesis.
Adequate textual evidence (direct quotations, summaries, and paraphrased passages) to support your claims and cites appropriately.
Proper mechanics; style, sentence structure, and spelling promote coherence, clarity, and credibility.

In many ways, this portion of the assignment is a way for me to get a better idea of where you are at in your writing coming into the class.

Please put your name, the name of the class, my name (Dr. Stover), and the date in the document as well as adding your last name and the page number to the top right corner (see the example close reading on Google Classroom for reference). Note that your total word count should be a minimum of 400 words not including this header or the citation. In other words, your paper itself should be 400-650 words.

By the way, here’s the MLA citation for the book the plays come from:

Author Last Name, Author First Name. “Play Title.” Literature of the Women’s Suffrage Campaign in England. Ed. Carolyn Christensen Nelson. Broadview Press, 2004, pp. xxx-xxx.

Play Trailer Presentation - Week 4

You will give a short, 4-5 minute presentation based on your play trailer. You can borrow from your close reading, but mainly you’re giving us a rundown of how you imagine the play you’ve chosen would be filmed based on the slide presentation you’ve created.

Practice your presentation so that you’re not just reading off of the slides. I recommend having any quotations you need to read printed/written out so that you don’t have to read from the screen. You want to try looking at the audience (your peers) as much as possible during the presentation.

You do not have to dress up for this presentation, although you certainly can.

Here are some things I’ll be looking for:

Follows directions, meaning you don’t go under or over your allotted 4-5 minutes.
Shows professionalism (i.e. takes the assignment seriously) including demonstrating that you’ve practiced your presentation beforehand.

How to Submit

For your Play Trailer and Close Reading, you will submit both assignments to Google Classroom AND Scholar.

To submit to Google Classroom, simply uplaod a Google Doc with your Close Reading AND the Google Slides you’ve created for your trailer.

For Scholar, download both the Google Doc and the Google Slides presentations as PDFs and submit them.

I owe credit to Susan Egenolf for the inspiration and some of the guidelines for this project.

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