Wide Sargasso Sea - Trailer (by Andrea Sanchez and Ma.Laura Straface)

We have decided to create a trailer of Wide Sargasso Sea. The rationale behind our choice is that we’ve really enjoyed reading it since Rhys offers an alternative explanation of Bertha’s madness  (Jane Eyre). What we’ve liked the most about Wide Sargasso Sea is that it gives voice to the Other. It isn't just a prequel. It’s the epitome of writing back to the Empire. Moreover, we consider that it has many important themes that can be fully exploited in a trailer. We watched the BBC adaptation of Wide Sargasso Sea some time ago and we noticed that several scenes portraying significant events of the novel were missing, such as Antoinette’s traumatic childhood, which, in our opinion, is essential to understand her struggle for identity. In our trailer, we’ve tried to prove that our imaginary film version of Wide Sargasso Sea is more complete than the BBC version since it shows the most important features and themes of the novel. To achieve our aim, we’ve carried out research on different movies, documentaries and videos looking for visual content that could help us match those parts from Wide Sargasso Sea that we had previously selected. We’ve looked for scenes in period movies so as to find a couple with Antoinette and Rochester’s characteristics and also scenes from slavery movies in order to depict Antoinette’s past as a child. We’ve joined all these scenes together to create our trailer.

As regards our textual strategy, we’ve selected different quotations from some of the main characters to match each of the different chosen parts of the trailer. To make it more vivid, we’ve used different text-to-speech converters so as to be able to convert the characters’ quotations into natural sounding voices.  Furthermore, in order to give our trailer a proper format we’ve written some lines to sum up what the movie is about and we’ve chosen a distinctive voice to read these lines aloud.  This audio strategy has been extremely helpful because we believe that when watching the trailer the viewer can immediately differentiate the characters’ voices from the voice-over. We’ve done extensive research on this since there are many text-to-speech converters that offer kind of “robotic” voices and our aim was to give our trailer a realistic look.

What’s been really challenging is that, as we mentioned before, there is already a film version of Wide Sargasso Sea but we couldn’t use any scenes from it and we didn’t want to use any pictures either. Therefore, this has given us much scope for creativity. 

Technical comment

In order to join all the movie scenes together we’ve worked with 'Cyberlink Power Director'- professional video editing software. The advantage of it is that it allows you to cut different movies scenes, join them together, and add transitions, effects, music and text. We’ve cut the different scenes we selected from movies, documentaries and videos and we’ve added them to our ‘Cyberlink Power Director’ project. As regards the audio, we’ve recorded the quotations and voice-over (previously converted into audio with different text-to-speech software) with Windows Sound Recorder. We’ve added the recordings to our project together with the scenes. We’ve also added the names of the actors and actresses so as to resemble a real trailer. Finally, we’ve added suspenseful music to create tension.

We really hope that our trailer looks as real as possible since that was our major aim from the very beginning.

Video editing software:

Cyberlink Power Director

Text-to-Speech converters:

http://www.naturalreaders.com/

http://www.oddcast.com/home/demos/tts/tts_example.php?sitepal

http://www.ivona.com

Movies, videos and documentaries:

Bianco E Nero. Dir. Cristina Comencini. Perf. Fabio Volo, Ambra Angiolini, Aïssa Maïga. 01 Distribution, 2008. DVD.

Masterpiece Classic: Wuthering Heights. Dir. Coky Giedroyc. Perf. Charlotte Riley, Tom Hardy, Andrew Lincoln. PBS, 2009. DVD.

Tula: The Revolt. Dir. Jeroen Leinders. Perf. Danny Glover, Jeroen Krabbé, Deobia Oparei. Fisheye Feature Films, 2013. DVD.

12 Years a Slave. Dir. Steve McQueen. Perf. Chiwetel Ejiofor, Michael Kenneth Williams, Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2013. DVD.
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, by Anne Bronte. Dir. Mike Barker. Perf. Toby Stephens, Tara Fitzgerald, Rupert Graves. BBC, 1996. DVD.

The Glass Virgin. Dir. Sarah Hellings. Perf. Jan Graveson, Christine Kavanagh, Brendan Coyle. Festival Films, 1995. DVD.

Slavery in Jamaica-Documentary. Dir. Georgina Harvey. BBC, 2005. DVD.

Witches-Documentary. Prod. Michelle Thibeault. Film Roos, 1996. A&E.

H. Kist. "Bill Viola - Fire Woman (2005)." YouTube. YouTube, 10 May 2014. Web. 07 Oct. 2014.