Four thousand miles. Six months. No roads, trails or motors.
In The Sun Is a Compass, biologist Caroline Van Hemert recounts the extraordinary wilderness journey she and her husband undertook from the Pacific Northwest to the Alaskan Arctic—traveling by rowboat, ski, foot, raft and canoe through some of the most remote terrain in North America.
This book trailer follows the path of that journey, combining Van Hemert's own narration with images captured during the expedition to convey its enormous scale, physical challenges and remarkable landscapes.
For this trailer, I started with an unusual combination of too much material and not enough story.
Caroline had recorded voiceover, and I was given access to an enormous archive of video that she and her husband had captured while documenting their journey. The footage was authentic and often beautiful, but it hadn't been shot with a promotional film—or really any particular finished video—in mind. Individually, the clips didn't provide much narrative structure.
So I went back to the book.
Reading the story gave me the context the footage was missing, and the map documenting their 4,000-mile route gave me the organizing device I needed. I could begin treating the journey itself as the narrative spine of the trailer.
I built the edit around Caroline's narration and used the map to establish progression and geography, then searched through the expedition archive for images that could illustrate the locations, experiences and emotional beats she described.
Instead of trying to force the footage to tell a story it hadn't been designed to tell, I used the book to understand what the footage represented. The map, narration and images could then work together to transform a largely unstructured archive into a coherent visual journey.
The raw materials were already there. My job was to discover the story connecting them.