Terror in ’62 is a teaser for a fictional documentary based on events from my novel Dogwood. In 1962, a Mississippi town was violently erased from existence. Decades later, survivors recall family members disappearing, people being driven from their homes, and a history that was deliberately buried beneath redacted records, official denial, and collective amnesia.
Generated interviews, restricted documents, period imagery, and archival footage construct the fragments of an investigation into what happened—and how deeply the subsequent cover-up may extend. The trailer presents the world of Dogwood as recovered history, using the visual language of documentary evidence to expand the novel’s mythology.
I initially tested Veo 3 with conventional scripted scenes, but the results were too unpredictable to sustain continuity across a complete dramatic sequence. That limitation suggested a different form. A documentary trailer could use separate but thematically connected images—interviews, records, locations, and archival fragments—without requiring every shot to maintain the same characters and environment.
I developed the concept around the aftermath of Dogwood and prompted three survivor interviews in Veo 3, along with the redacted-paperwork montage and restricted-area imagery. Because generated video remains unreliable when rendering written language, I corrected the necessary copy in ChatGPT.
I wrote the voice-over narration and created its performance through ElevenLabs text-to-speech, prompted the score in Udio, and sourced additional historical material from the Internet Archive’s Prelinger collection. The edit combines those generated and archival elements into the teaser for a documentary that does not exist—but feels as though it might.