Stand by Me – The Vietnam War Movie

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For my project I chose to edit the 1986 film “Stand By Me” by Robert Reiner into a 3 minute war movie trailer. The editing process for this mostly included watching the film and noting which scenes either had dialogue that referenced war themes or scenes where the color, lighting, voice, and sound was more representative of dreary jungle warfare. This particularly movie lent itself well to being chopped up into a war documentary. The original story follows a group of young boys in the 50’s in a coming of age quest to find a body. Although most of the original movie is warmly lit summer scenes and playful dialogue it does pry into the darker sides of the children’s psyche as they are forced to internalize the concept of death and their own mortalities.

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I would say the component of Pandian’s “Reel World” that I focused most heavily on while editing was voice. Since the movie revolves around the topic of innocence being introduced to death much of the dialogue could easily be transposed into a war movie. Throughout the trailer I also utilized a sound file of Linden B. Johnson talking about the Vietnam War and America’s duty to fight in it. Throughout this entire sound file Johnson’s voice is somber and trailing and it helps compliment the action that is being visually depicted. I also used sound clips of gunfire and helicopters during certain scenes to indicate that there is action occurring off screen even though you can’t see it. This use of sounds to reference aspects of the video that the viewer can’t see helps invoke the viewer’s imagination to fill in the visual gaps. In class we discussed imagination as one of Pandian’s pillars of filmmaking, since there are no actual war scenes in the movie ‘Stand by Me” I had to utilize imagination aiding by sound. Another audio component of the trailer that I chose to include was the song “The End” by the Doors. The inspiration to use this song came from the Vietnam War movie “Apocalypse now” by Francis Ford Coppola. Although “The End” doesn’t directly reference the Vietnam War it does deal with the concept of death (the end) and was therefore suitable for my trailer. Also the song has long instrumental breaks which helped to not clutter the trailer with too much dialogue.

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One scene in particular that I believe worked well for my purposes of converting the film into a war movie was where the children started to mentally break down around a campfire at night. The scene also included a gun which was just a bonus in getting the war aspect across. The darkness of the night shot helped to create a somber and dangerous aspect. I also played around with the hue and saturation to make the scene more pale and blue which further accentuated the somber tone. I attempted to composite a heavy rain to match the environmental conditions of Vietnam (but I’m not a very good compositor). Changing the colors in this scene helped it to tell a different story, instead of children dealing with internal struggles around a warm campfire they are now facing an external treat in a dark and wet jungle. As Pandian mentioned the colors used in a film are extremely important for both the feeling a shot imparts on its viewers as well as thematic and symbolical aspects of its plot.

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Space was also an important component of both my trailer and the original film. In the beginning of the trailer I included many shots of the children walking either on railroad tracks or in fields. The large amount of head room and zoomed out nature of the shots allow the viewer to understand how far the children soldiers must march. By including multiple scenes with the children walking it also affects the concept of time and portrays what the viewer believes to be a long march in only a few seconds.

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Pandian, A. (2015). Reel world: an anthropology of creation. Duke University Press.

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