THE PROPHECY SEASON 2
Audible brings stories to life through outstanding writing, dialogue, music, and sound design, so we’re always thrilled to help take these stories one step further with cinematic audiobook trailers. In season two of “The Prophecy,” Dr. Virginia Marilyn Edwards and her child are chased across the country, aided by friends, pursued by evil forces, and guided by Virginia’s prophetic visions.
It’s an action-filled supernatural thriller, rich with metaphor and poetic imagery, that revolves around the timeless battle of good and evil. We discovered that stained glass was an ideal style for portraying these light and dark themes, but it raised the challenge:
How do we balance the modern and the ancient, the thrilling and the contemplative, inside a brisk 30 second trailer?
CONTRAST IS ACTION
Beyond fast cuts and a high-energy score, we know that contrast is a great driver of action, so we began our explorations by breaking down Virginia’s visions and looking for themes we can contrast: light vs. dark, good vs. evil, order vs. chaos, motion vs. stillness, fire vs. water. These, paired with our key story beats, inspired the four tableaus that surround Virginia’s central plot-line: life on the run with her child.
From there, our story snaps into focus: Hands raised in praise become a mob pursuing our heroine; a contemporary politician and street unrest reveal their mythic counterpart in a coiling serpent; waves of liquid glass and flares of embers build as voices around Virginia surge to a crescendo. These contrasts don’t spoil the story, but they highlight the conflict and set the cosmic stakes.
CANDY COLORED GLASS
In developing the visual style, we found stained glass is a beautifully imperfect art form where dyed and painted pebbles of glass are suspended in webs of molten lead. We explored dozens of glass textures and techniques before settling on a mixture we felt had the correct amount of colorful clarity, surface roughness, and a suspended crystalline structure.
Not too ancient; not too modern; just right for our story.
PROCESS
To give our team and our partners at Audible maximum flexibility to iterate, we created a hybrid 2D/3D process:
Our illustrators painted our scenes with separate layers for brush-stroked color and outlines that would guide the “lead lines” in 3D.
Our Cinema4d artists procedurally modeled the stained glass in 3D so they could update as our illustrations refined. They then lit our scene and animated our cameras.
Finally, our 3D renders were composited, refined, and sweetened in After Effects for the correct balance of color and contrast.
ABSTRACTION
One last creative consideration was how much abstraction to apply to Virginia and the other figures in the spot. We first explored a more classical painterly style, but we ultimately felt this leaned too heavily on the ‘ancient’ side of our ancient/modern balance.
Instead, we pursued a more abstracted style that felt more contemporary and left more of the characters appearance to the listener’s imagination.
Finally, to close the spot, we chose to resolve to Audible’s photo key art of Kerry Washington — which we and our partners felt gave us that final step toward the contemporary.
FADE OUT
Fans of great audiobooks are thrilled with this next release in the The Prophecy series, and we count ourselves among them. Good and evil is a timeless struggle, and we’re happy to have had a hand in shining a light on the next chapter of this story.
