The Car – trailer

I decided to attempt a silent film version trailer for The Car, a 1977 killer car movie. The film is about a possessed car that drives around on its own through a small southwestern town running people down, and occasionally backing up to finish the job.

I did it in iMovie, which I had never used before. That made it a little tedious. I downloaded the trailer and brought it into the program. There I turned down the color and played a little with the brightness and contrast. I pulled segments from the trailer, rearranging some and leaving out most of the talking parts. I think I kept too much of the phone conversation near the end, but I couldn’t do without the car coming through the window.

Silent films used to have piano soundtracks. They’d have a pianist in the theater playing along with the movie. I just happened to hear about a guy who plays Mastodon on piano, and thought this would be a perfect soundtrack. I pulled a film reel sound effect from freesound for the start of the trailer, and added a horn blast from Public Enemy’s Night Train (which may have been sampled from somewhere else, like Blood Sweat and Tears) to bookend the piano. I did it in Audacity, based on the timings from iMovie, and I had to export to mp3 and import into Garageband so iMovie could find it.

I made title cards in Photoshop. Instead of dialogue, I used a song title from the Campbell Brothers, Don’t Let The Devil Ride, because it fits the storyline.

It was quite a bit of work putting all the parts together. It would have been better if I could have gotten the timing and rhythms of the music and sounds to fit together more smoothly.