Artifact 1

Artifact 1

Movie Trailer for Red Rising by Pierce Brown.

Created for Multimedia Tools in Education. By Antonios Roditis

I selected the movie trailer I created for our course for my first artifact since I found it to be an interesting and creative project. I've helped students make trailers in the past, but I never sat down and went through the entire process myself. It was actually a fun activity.

The novel I selected for my book trailer for our Multimedia course is Red Rising by Pierce Brown. I read it for the first time about three years ago and was instantly hooked. On the surface, the novel appears to be a standard science fiction adventure novel. In reality, it goes much deeper and asks the reader to question political systems, self-determination, and societal structure as we know it. I first suggested it to my students in 2015, specifically for uninterested readers. The response was better than expected, and I actually managed to turn a few reluctant non-readers to avid constant readers. It was a great moment in teaching. I plan on using this trailer next semester as a sample for my students to create their own trailers for independent novels

Spoiler Alert: In the novel, sixteen-year-old Darrow is a Red, the lowest of the social class color coated hierarchy of the future. Essentially a slave, he lives a hard life as a helldiver, a miner with an exceptionally dangerous job and short life-expectancy. Everyone he knows lives a miserable life, but he finds happiness in his wife and family. One night, he and wife trespass into a garden belonging to the higher colors and are caught.

His wife Eo, is then publicly flogged and sings a forbidden song of protest. This song leads to her immediate execution. After watching her die, Darrow steals her body and buries her which is forbidden as she is meant to stay on the noose as a warning to others. He does this knowing he will be executed for his crime, but he does it happily refusing to live in such a hellish world any longer.

After his execution, Darrow wakes and finds that he has been saved by The Sons of Ares, a resistance group that wants to use him as a weapon against the high colors. Darrow happily agrees. They genetically alter him to make him as large and beautiful as the ruling class, the Golds, and send him to their academy where he begins to infiltrate the same ruling class that tormented him and killed his wife. From there, the novel explodes leading the reader through Darrow’s quest for revenge, justice, and revolution.

Creating the trailer and finding matching music was fairly time consuming, but was manageable. Going through the process helped me better understand the challenges my students will face when creating their own trailers. I used Windows Movie Maker, which was very straight forward. One challenge I will have to contend with is training my students to use a web-based application since their Chromebooks will not support Windows Movie Maker.