TRAILERS

In the series, both Hodges and Brady are outcasts. Brady is an antisocial 20-something that lives with his alcoholic mother. Hodges is a retired detective, estranged from his sense of purpose and his immediate family.  When it came time to find music for the trailer, it was important to find a track that could convey the angst and anger of two men on the fringes. When I heard 21st Century Schizoid Man by King Crimson, I immediately knew that it would work. Once this song was in place, the rest of the trailer and the tone of the whole campaign came into focus.

SPOTS/TEASERS

 

Prior to the release of the trailer, we created a series of teasers that give a glimpse into to the world of our main characters.

Brady teases the story’s antagonist, Brady Heartfeld. He’s a cyberbully with a penchant for vehicle manslaughter. His worldview is dark, yet there is a playful menace at work as he pulls the marionette strings from behind his keyboard. We tried to communicate this demented sensibility with a music track that is both childlike and twisted. The track, World Out There is meant to function like a pied piper’s call for lost souls, as if it were blaring from the rusty speakers of Brady’s ice cream truck.

Spoon teases the story’s protagonist of Bill Hodges, a man still tormented by his last case as a detective, the Mr. Mercedes massacre. Two years later he is still haunted by the screams of the innocent victims at the hands of the eponymous killer. We used sound design as our primary window into Bill’s psyche. We layered vocal screams, screeching tires, and various reverb effects to create a wall of sound that would communicate Bill’s unnerving daydream while peering into his reflection on a spoon.

Duel showcases the cat and mouse game that these two men (Bill and Brady) enter into, where the machinations of police procedure and criminal justice quickly take a backseat to personal vengeance.

The teasers are punctuated by a visual device that I coined the "screen takeover.” It’s a technique that mirrors the way that Brady (aka Mr. Mercedes) digitally hacks into Hodges’ laptop to send him cryptic messages. During these screen takeovers, Mr. Mercedes uses the avatar of a yellow happy face to address Hodges directly. We buttoned the teasers with a glitching yellow happy face to foreshadow the twisted hijinks of our story's villain.

 

 

EPISODIC PROMOS

A quick note on the music for the episodic promos. As the story begins, Hodges and Brady communicate primarily through the digital world, so we chose to use music beds with synths and electronic instrumentation at the start of the season (103). As the two men move closer and closer to a physical confrontation, the music takes on a more live instrument,  60’s rock feel (108), with blues scales and tremolo guitars being the dominant elements in our sonic palette. Finally, as the story reaches its dramatic climax, we employed an aggressive prog rock vibe (109 and 110) that mirrors the unhinged emotional state of our main characters as they prepare for their inevitable final showdown.