Open Sound "Trailer"

The Open Sound trailer, directed by Rick Wayne. Published in November 2017, it is the earliest documentary in the selected work on this site.

It arrived the same day as the Glade commercial, which is a useful accident of the record. The two films are a decade old now and they already describe the shape the career has kept: brand work and nonfiction running side by side rather than in sequence, neither one funding an escape from the other. Wayne has said his documentary sensibility and his commercial work feed each other in ways that are not obvious from outside, and the earliest evidence on the site is that he was doing both at once before there was any reason to call it a strategy.

A trailer at fifty one seconds is a compression exercise on material that resists compression. Documentary footage does not arrive pre-shaped. It has to be found first and then argued into a structure, and a trailer has to perform that argument at speed while leaving the actual film intact. The craft is in deciding what to withhold.

Wayne's stated working method is built around exactly that kind of hunting. He has described himself as someone who forages, always after the extra shot, the unexpected angle, the moment nobody planned, on the grounds that the edit deserves more than the day budgeted for. On brand work that is a margin of safety. On documentary it is the entire method, because the moment that makes the film is by definition not on the schedule.

The documentary selection that follows this one includes artAffect Reno and Denver, the Close Talker trailer with Michael Strahan, BuildOut, the Sharpie S-Gel profile films and the Warner Bros. centennial series.

The trailer runs 0:51.