Monday, April 30, 2012

Hunger Games Trailer

     Hello! Above is the trailer the Hunger Games group created for our book! Enjoy!

Thursday, April 19, 2012

Post 4: Adapting the Hunger Games

            Hello to all my fans! I’m back again with some more mind-boggling thoughts!
Would the Hunger Games be a hard film to make? Well, there would be many challenges. A challenge a filmmaker might have into making the Hunger Games into a movie is the fact that the whole setting is in the future. All the buildings in the Capitol have to be created in a futuristic style and District 12 has to have a village-type feel to it. Also, a setting for the arena would have to be found. Another obstacle is that a lot of the actors of the main characters would have to go through training to be able to portray the skills of their characters. All the different technologies of the futuristic world of Panem would also have to be shown.
However, this movie might be easier than some other books to create, based on the fact that there is a lot of action that wouldn’t be too hard to recreate on the screen. I do admit that, especially in the arena, there is a lack of dialogue that would make the scenes become boring, so that is another thing the screenwriters would have to pay attention to.
Some scenes that I believe are essential to the book (that cannot be cut out of the movie) are:
·         Katniss offering herself as tribute instead of Prim and Peeta is chosen
·         Peeta declaring his love for Katniss during the interviews
·         Katniss’ and Peeta’s suicide threat at the end of the Hunger Games
·         Katniss telling Peeta that she doesn’t love him
This last scene (as I have heard from friends who saw the movie) was cut out of the movie, leaving the movie with a totally different mood at the end. I have not seen the movie myself, so I am not able to pass any judgments, but I believe they cut that scene out because they will not be making another movie. That’s just my guess.
Another scene (or scenes you could say) that I heard was cut out of the movie was the relationship Peeta and Katniss carried throughout their stay in the cave. I don’t think that was a good idea on the filmmaker’s part because to many, many fans, that was the best part of the book!! Tsk tsk.
If I absolutely had to cut two things from the book, it would probably be Katniss’ relationship with her father, and how Peeta’s father gave cookies to Katniss before she left for the Hunger Games. I feel like both scenes wouldn’t transition so well into the movie and they might just take up necessary space.
Although I have finished the Hunger Games, I have not seen the movie yet, and looking forward to doing that soon and evaluating if it does justice to the book! Goodbye for now!

Wednesday, April 4, 2012


Book 1 Project
Hello ladies and gentlemen! My name is Mehak Kalra, and today I’m going to help you all make a lot of money! How? By advertising our book in a way that will gain a wider audience in a fun and memorable way!
We’re all on the same team here, Team John Dies at the End. Great book, am I right? Now I’ve got here 2 fantabulous ideas that are going to help us make the big bucks.
Idea 1
My first idea is that we sell a pair of glasses with the book. Not just ordinary glasses, oh no! These glasses would be fitted with special lenses that, when worn, would show the wearer a series of monsters or supernatural images. This would duplicate the images and unworldly creatures that John and Dave see in the book. However, we’d have to put a cautionary warning on them, don’t we? *chuckles*
For example, the wearers would see a monster like Dave and John saw on page 16 of the novel, “The man-shaped arrangement of meat rose up, as if functioned as one body. It pushed itself up on two arms made of game hens and country bacon, planting two hands with sausage-link fingers on the floor…it stood fully upright, looking like the mascot for a butcher shop…”
The glasses would sort through the images of various monsters in the book in a random order, always surprising the wearer. My engineers are in the lab right now, perfecting the model of these glasses; there are sample prototypes if anyone wants to take a look.
Attaching these to the copies of the book will make the book more appealing on the shelf of a bookstore. More people will see the humorous side of the book, which would attract them to buy it. Also, the glasses will help the reader connect with the book and feel a bond with Dave and John’s ability to see unnatural things. And don’t worry; I haven’t forgotten the dedicated readers who already have the book! Pairs of glasses will be available, without the book, at a low and convenient price that will also bring us in money. http://www.google.com/imgres?hl=en&gbv=2&biw=1024&bih=677&tbm=isch&tbnid=B6_hEb0jFulMdM:&imgrefurl=http://www.myspace.com/potipoti_berlin/photos/14436073&docid=0RS-8A2Pdy4URM&imgurl=http://a4.ec-images.myspacecdn.com/images01/102/400aa0269e56bfe81bd883590dc9ece6/l.jpg&w=475&h=317&ei=6_p8T6CKE4KY8gS95JTbDA&zoom=1&iact=hc&vpx=451&vpy=283&dur=2422&hovh=183&hovw=275&tx=89&ty=121&sig=102919788086884462555&page=2&tbnh=149&tbnw=205&start=15&ndsp=20&ved=1t:429,r:7,s:15,i:136
Idea 2
My second idea to help promote the book is create a haunted house in which each room would correspond to a different scene or location from the book. Who doesn’t love a good haunted house, right? *chuckles* In each room would be the different monsters Dave and John encounter at each location. Not only would this type of attraction entice the adult readers of the novel, but also fans of scary things (like haunted houses) that may enjoy the feel of it and decide to read the book.
One example of a room in the haunted house would be the Morrison’s house that Dave and John go to with Shelly on page 9, “…a simple two-story farmhouse, black shutters on white siding. It sat on an island of turf in a sea of harvest-flattened cornfields. We walked past a mailbox shaped like a cow and saw a hand-painted sign on the front door that read The Morrison’s-Established 1962.” Once the people went through the front door, they would follow a guide that would tell them to go to the basement, like John and Dave did, seeing, “A nice, modern basement. Washer and dryer. A hot-water heater making a soft ticking sound. One of those waist-deep floor freezers.” The guide would explain what happens in that part of the story, and press a button that would play the voices of John and David’s narration in the scene as they come to the realization that Shelly is a monster. Then, the people would be led up the stairs to see, “She burst into snakes…Her body sort of spilled out of itself, falling into a dark, writhing puddle on the ground. It was a tangle of long, black serpents, rolling over each other and down the steps.” The guide would lead them through the rest of the house, and they would encounter the frightening creatures Dave and John did.
Another example of a room in the haunted house would be “Big Jim” and Amy’s house that Dave and John visit a couple times throughout the book. They would see that outside of the house as, “The two-story psycho-style house…would have cost most of a million dollars had it not been run-down and located in a weedy, desolate section of town…Peeling paint, filthy windows, no tire tracks in the driveway” (Wong 258). Then the people would be lead inside, the whole time listening to clips of conversation that had occurred in the book, and “Up a stairway, into a darkened hall” (Wong 261). The guide would direct them into a side door that would be, “…a large room, that in the dim glow from the window, looked like a library of shelves mostly filled with odd shadowy shapes that were not books. I saw what looked like a bundle of cobweb hanging from the ceiling…” In that room they would see a monster described as, “…a bundle of wet string, suspended in the air by nothing at all. It didn’t look so much like a jellyfish as a man-o’-war, the slimy things that float lazily on the ocean surface and let their stringy tentacles hang down in the water” (Wong 261). http://www.google.com/imgres?num=10&hl=en&gbv=2&biw=1024&bih=677&tbm=isch&tbnid=TMjTyuW9M1NI7M:&imgrefurl=http://www.fanpop.com/spots/halloween/images/16050647/title/haunted-house-wallpaper&docid=zSPzzuaSMdboqM&imgurl=http://images4.fanpop.com/image/photos/16000000/Haunted-House-halloween-16050647-1280-800.jpg&w=1280&h=800&ei=XPp8T_jkIKG10QHt2fSVDA&zoom=1&iact=hc&vpx=313&vpy=385&dur=1309&hovh=177&hovw=284&tx=131&ty=198&sig=102919788086884462555&sqi=2&page=1&tbnh=137&tbnw=253&start=0&ndsp=12&ved=1t:429,r:9,s:0,i:154
So, ladies and gentlemen, as you can see, this haunted house would lead people through the different adventures of Dave and John, providing the real fear they must’ve felt. After this thrilling quest, copies of the book will be available for them to buy at the end of the haunted house.
All in all, these ideas will grab in a ton of money for the book, and are sure-fire ways to catch more people in! Thank you!