I took a video editing class in college that included a project to make a two-minute trailer for the movie of your choice.

It wasn’t about recreating the real trailer, but rather doing whatever you wanted to make it your own. On the surface this sounds really easy, but distilling a two-hour film down to a trailer that highlights enough to get people interested without giving too much away is a bit tough.

Neither I nor most of my group had the least bit of preference for which film to tackle, so we ended up going with Jason’s pick of “Life As A House.” This added another layer of difficulty since I’m pretty sure none of the rest of us had ever heard of the movie, let alone seen it.

Fortunately the local video rental place had a copy — VHS I believe — and a few viewings later we came up with this:

At gunpoint I could recite this entire thing word-for-word. I may have seen it a few too many times.

I’m especially proud of the ending, where Kevin Kline’s character is smashing all the little models to the beat of the music as if they are drums. This is one of those happy accidents that pops up in creative ventures sometimes. As I recall, the footage just happened to almost line up when we first cut it, so it was just a matter of tweaking things a bit (like slowing down the last shot) to get it just right.

So how did we do? Here’s the actual trailer from 2001:

We didn’t watch the real one until after ours was done. We felt like they told a totally different story, one that seemed to put a happier spin on the movie than what was actually there. Maybe they thought more people would want to go see it that way.

Things didn’t go so well at the box office though. Maybe they should have hired us instead.