Paris, 1930s. Lee Miller arrives determined to become a photographer rather than remain the subject of other people's photographs.
Inspired by Whitney Scharer's novel The Age of Light, this motion-graphics book trailer evokes the world of Lee Miller and Man Ray through period imagery, photography and objects drawn from the story.
Rather than attempting to summarize the entire novel, the piece creates an impression of its world—a story of art, ambition, desire and a woman determined to define herself as an artist on her own terms.
Small budgets were a regular creative constraint for certain book campaigns, which meant I often had to build a visual approach almost entirely from the resources I could find or create myself.
My starting point was always the book.
Whenever possible, I read extensively about the title—and often as much of the manuscript or finished book as I could—looking for characters, locations, objects and visual details that could become the vocabulary of the piece.
For The Age of Light, I built the trailer around an imagined dresser in a Paris room, populating it with artifacts connected to the novel and its characters. The objects allowed me to suggest the story indirectly, turning a single environment into a kind of visual narrative rather than attempting to recreate scenes from the novel on a budget that couldn't support them.
I supplemented that constructed world with archival-style stock footage of period Paris, then combined the imagery through editing and motion graphics to create a cohesive sense of time and place.
The limitation ultimately determined the solution: if I couldn't afford to film 1930s Paris, I could still create the feeling that the viewer had discovered a room belonging to someone who lived there.