The Road by Cormac McCarthy tells the dark tale of father and son, as they attempt to survive in a brute reality — dependent on each other's loyalty and animalistic understandings of nature. Purely based on this description, it should be clear this is not a peachy, coming-of-age novel or topic. 

The protagonists face incredible obstacles to merely survive. And for the father, these obstacles are ultimately unsurmountable. As the boy exits his forrest persona and reality, he is afforded a new opportunity, a "take two." But though the family he leaves with appears to be caring, to offer a fresh start, memories remain.

What becomes fascinating, though, is the fragmentation of memory over time or as a result of traumatic experiences. And this is clearly demonstrated in McCarthy's protagonists. As the boy remembers his perfect day, complete with rowing and sunshine, his reality is left unchanged. But the memory shifts and adapts, taking into account the boy's forgetfulness, the extreme circumstances of the trek down the road.  

This video might have been one of the most difficult assignments of the semester for me, given my inclination to represent McCarthy's characters through abstractions rather than physical sensory details. For the first bit of time planning the piece, I focused solely on theme. I realized this would be one of the most streamlined ways to approach what I feel is a rather philosophically-driven text. 

Having decided what I wanted to illuminate in the video — the boy's memory of the "perfect" day — I moved on to considering the types of materials I could use to create a version of the boy's descriptions. Given the abstraction of the piece, I chose a sluggish video of a speed boat cutting through fog as the video footage for the first piece of the video. My next formative decision came into play when I selected the footage of the little boy running the bases to his father's encouragement. I immediately found that a really interesting contrast to the father telling the son to "go ahead" and desert him in The Road. In juxtaposing this notion of a traditional childhood memory and the harsh reality of death in The Road, I hoped to do my own part in shifting and accentuating certain parts of the "perfect" day and reflected what the boy has experienced since that instance.

I also smoothed over a particularly jarring moment in my first version of the video, which although a tiny detail, made an enormous difference in setting the tone for the piece.