Wanda, Milo, Professor Flummox (Taken with instagram)
Trailer #3.
Clearly a lot of work went into developing the iMovie trailer templates, from the title animations to the shot suggestions to the original scores recored with the London Symphony Orchestra. And I’ll grant that I don’t have a better idea about how to motivate people to edit and share their home movies.
But if you’re going to use standard home movie footage, these trailers are kind of wildly discordant. Even the examples Apple cut together for the template chooser aren’t especially successful (running the gamut from cheesy to non sequitur).
But for a group of imaginative children ready to “make a movie”, these are kind of @#$%ing brilliant.
This was one of the funnest days I recall having as a dad. (Trailer 1 | Trailer 2)
Behind-the-scenes
…and here’s Trailer #2. We snuck a few Action Movie Effects into this one.
For the boy’s birthday party we made some movies with his pals and a green screen made with a bed sheet and dowel rods. Here’s Trailer #1.
8th Birthday Present: Golden Ticket to a Pixar Tour
John Elder Robison has turned advocacy for people with autism into one of his Aspergian special interests. He kicks ass in this interview with Steve Silberman from last May:
One of the things that troubles people about the use of labels like “low-functioning” and “high-functioning” is that people will call a five-year-old kid who can’t talk “low-functioning,” yet a kid who has language skills, like me, but doesn’t have any friends, is described as “high-functioning.” First of all, of those two children, the so-called high-functioning kid is the one who is at material risk for suicide by the time he’s 16. Most people would not call a dead kid highly functional.
I know two families with (non-spectrum) teenage kids who have dropped out of high school because of their inability to adapt themselves into their societally expected roles. The prospect of my “high-functioning” second grader struggling as they have weighs heavy on my heart sometimes.
Occasional breaks for Beakman routines.
