A parent's child has been kidnapped. To get her back, there's a ransom to pay—and another child to abduct.
Adrian McKinty's thriller The Chain turns kidnapping into a terrifying system in which victims are forced to become perpetrators, each family becoming another link in an expanding chain.
This book trailer reduces that premise to its most unsettling image: a child held captive, waiting for someone to decide what happens next.
The Chain was another book campaign with very limited production resources, but in this case reading the novel gave me the solution almost immediately.
I loved the book and recognized that its central premise was powerful enough that I didn't need to recreate its plot. I needed one image that could communicate the fear, confinement and moral horror behind it.
So I built the trailer around that idea.
Without the budget for a conventional narrative shoot, I created the imagery myself and used motion graphics, editing, typography and sound to construct a tense visual interpretation of the novel. The goal wasn't to summarize The Chain. It was to recreate the feeling I had while reading it and give viewers just enough information to understand the nightmare at the center of the story.
The imagery proved powerful enough to produce an unexpected response. When the trailer appeared on Facebook, the imprint received complaints from some viewers who associated its imagery with contemporary news coverage of migrant children in detention. That wasn't an intentional reference, but it demonstrated something important about visual storytelling: images don't exist in isolation. Audiences bring the world around them into what they see.
For me, the project was another example of turning a production limitation into the creative premise. I couldn't afford to dramatize The Chain, so I found the single visual idea that could make the audience feel it.