Fugitive card

Over the next few weeks, I’d like to look at some of my favorite crime films. Something about cops and robbers grabs me. Maybe it’s the loyalty and betrayal – or the chess match between good guys and bad guys racing to figure out where all the pieces fit before their counterparts do. Emotional and tactical thinking. Passion and prowess. Great directors and performances. Romanticizing childhood. The works.

For my Return to the Silent Era assignment, I decided to rework a trailer for Heat, which I watched three times in the theater when it came out. Since then I’ve watched it a kajillion times on VHS and DVD. Danny Trejo, Jeremy Piven, and Henry Rollins in one film! Hometown star Amy Brenneman!

I grabbed a trailer from YouTube using the Firefox add-on Download Helper.

Then, to begin producing the silent era trailer, I searched the Creative Commons pool on Flickr for a card I could use for titles, dialogue, and credits. I found this card and painted over its text in Acorn.

Next, I watched the trailer a few times to transcribe the dialogue and narration.

After that, I imported the trailer into iMovie and began to work on editing it.

It was a shame to strip out the soundtrack and dialogue. The trailer, like the film, is a gem of both audio and visual editing, pacing, and story-telling. I love the soundtrack, including Moby’s contributions. To preserve some of that pacing, I tried to edit the trailer in such a way that my title, credit, and dialogue cards occupied splits where new dialogue or dramatic beats existed in the original trailer.

After I stripped out the sound, I made the clip black and white. Then I exported it.

Next, I made my title, credit, and dialogue cards in Acorn. I edited out some lines from the original trailer. I also amended or otherwise edited some of the dialogue I used so that it would fit legibly on a card and not take too long to read. I used the STFangSong font because its serif has more curves than corners, like the border embellishment of the cards I used for text.

I opened iMovie again, imported the black and white version of the trailer, and edited in my cards. I made a new card for Regency because its original logo had some animation on it. I left the first Warner Bros. credit alone because it’s a static painting of an iconic trademark; it isn’t so jarringly modern as an animated logo.

After I worked in my cards, I exported the movie again. Then I imported that file back into iMovie. With every new import, I deleted older clips from the editing box in iMovie, but kept them inside the project library for reference so that I could, say, skim the original trailer to see who said what when.

I used the film grain effect in iMovie to age and deform the black and white trailer.

Then I searched freesound.org for piano riffs to use in the trailer. I wanted something elegiac that sounded unproduced (like a real piano) and that looped like Moby’s theme in the trailer. I found this clip, which had a tinny sound to it, almost as if it had been recorded and played-back on early, low quality audio equipment, or as if it had suffered over time from multiple-transfers to new audio formats on its way into my trailer. I opened Garage Band and played around with layering this loop with other samples from freesound.org, but I couldn’t make anything that wasn’t way too distracting. Ultimately, I just looped my sample for the length of the trailer. However, I wouldn’t mind trying to score it sometime in the future using Garage Band and a Korg Nano Key or something.

Finally, I exported the grainy, piano-looped silent era trailer, uploaded it, and shared it here.

In watching it again (and again and again as I worked), I think I could have edited out everyone but Pacino and De Niro. I suspect the narrative of this silent era trailer would have worked better in terms of pacing if it had focused exclusively on the main characters and the core dynamic of their relationship with one another. As it is, the silent era trailer feels a little long to me, but that might also be a function of the music I chose or something else that will hit me later.