The Sounds of the Road Video
The Road Trailer: Carrying the Fire
Draft Version
Introduction
After we saw trailer mashup assignments from previous classes, I felt inspired to make a trailer for The Road. It was harder than I expected, because I didn't want to fall into the category of lame homegrown YouTube movie trailers. It took a while to overcome writer's block, but this is what I came up with.
Visual Elements
I tried to recreate the intense buildup that professional trailers usually have. I also incorporated scenes from the book as well as the actual trailer. For example, because the conversation that the man and the boy had about carrying the fire is so meaningful, I tried to recreate that with a video of a log fire and some text dialogue. I thought that it would be cool to distinguish who was speaking on opposite corners of the screen. On the other hand, there were already dramatic scenes in the movie trailer that is already out that fit great with the direction my trailer was taking, such as the gunshot scene that fades to white. This was a great turning point for the video. Because the official trailer is so well done, I had to resist from borrowing too heavily; I still wanted to make an original work. Keeping this in mind and trying to find a good balance was difficult.
Note: In my campfire dialogue scene, I stayed with McCarthy's lack of apostrophe use. I realized that it looks just plain wrong to people who haven't read the book, but I didn't want to stray from his style. It was one of the more prominent things in the book to me, and it reflected the theme of devolution. When nobody needs to know how to write anymore, small things such as quotation marks and apostrophes become unnecessary.
Sound Elements
Music
Because I wanted the video to follow the buildup and intensity of a typical movie trailer, it was difficult to find fitting music. I originally wanted to go with more futuristic, techno-inspired music, but The Road has such a strong focus on devolution. The more orchestral tune I finally settled on wasn't too futuristic but built up in intensity and tapered off at a good place in the track. I also repeated the loud singing chorus for the gaps between video clips once the trailer became more intense.
Sound Effects
Some of my sound effects created a sense of intimacy while also building up intensity, such as the heavy breathing sounds. The winter scene at the beginning actually came with music, but I opted to mute it and add sound effects from clips of walking in the snow and howling winds from a snowstorm. Then, some sound effects I had were already in the clips I pulled from the trailer, such as the thief's labored breathing, the gun or arrow shots, and the pounding on doors/kicking/screaming from the cannibal scene.
Revisions
- I edited a mild grammatical/style issue: “Along the way, their humanity is tested”
- To better mimic a conversation, I made dialogue fade in instead of flashing
- I edited volume levels to make my voice more clear and the background music less overwhelming at points
- I replaced the long arrow scene with 5 fast paced scenes to mimic the flow of a trailer, where there is an intense moment and then, as Professor Anderson puts it, people get jazzed up
- Kettle drums are the sound transitions for the fast paced scenes
- My font choices are now more interesting and better reflect the mood of a post-apocalyptic world. The dialogue font was changed to a more casual one than Times New Roman because it seemed appropriate for conversation.
Final Version
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