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Stephen King's The Dark Tower - A Concept Trailer

Siliconmaster

Siliconmaster

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I've long been a fan of the Dark Tower series, and it's been frustrating to see multiple attempts (and failures) to adapt it over the last decade or two. The movie that came out with Idris Elba barely resembled the source material at all. While talking with friends I realized that I had vague ideas of what my ideal trailer would be, and news that Mike Flanagan (Haunting of Hill House, Haunting of Bly Manor, Fall of the House of Usher) is trying to get a comprehensive adaptation off the ground lent me extra inspiration.

Central to the concept is the image from the first book of Roland coming into town and hearing the patrons of the saloon singing "Hey Jude." For me it's one of the first and most striking anachronisms of the book and the first hint that this world is not actually the Old West as it appears to be.

Looking outward for content, I learned that Marvel had done comic adaptations of the first three books, which gave me a huge library of images to work from. I also had all the original book artwork as well as any other images or video I could wrangle together. I edited out captions in Photoshop, did a lot of animation in After Effects, and had a blast assembling the project in general.

Most images were run through AI upscalers and then touched up by hand to try to preserve the look of the original artwork. In a lot of cases I was able to layer the captionless versions from the back of the comic runs to remove the captions, but in others I turned to the new Adobe AI tools like content aware fill and generative fill. Wild stuff, absurdly powerful. I even expanded some images sideways to allow for widescreen usage.

Dark-Tower-Audio-Work.png


Audio was also quite a bit of work. I had to match sound effects to the audiobook voice actors (grunts, yells, coughing) as well as build background ambience for the two opening story sections.

Overall I enjoyed working on this project and I'm excited to show you all!
 
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Very cool. As a trailer, I think it's really effective from 2:45 to the end. Especially that "From Author Stephen King" against the refrain. Goosebumps.
 
Thanks! I know I've pulled off a good edit moment when it gives me goosebumps too haha.

I also know it's an unusual format for a trailer. The books are so sprawling that it's a tricky feat to balance establishing the plot versus spoiling how King slowly drip feeds info and reveals. My goal was to leave the viewer with about as much context as the average reader gets by the end of the first book, at least regarding the Tower itself. I decided the slower pace of the opening works well enough. Then when you hit the true trailer section it has that heft behind it already.
 
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