The Road Assignment

Project – The Road - Produce a Powerpoint with at least five images that illustrate five great quotes in the book. Be creative in your choices. Remember there is some glimmer of hope in the story; you can also add hope to your image selections as well. (WARNING: NO CANNIBALISM in your assignment. I know it is there – I just don’t want to see it. Concentrate on other imagery from the novel.)

In addition to your powerpoint, type up an explanation of each photo and why you chose it. Give me depth. Study the photos. Do not state the obvious. Explain what the story of the picture is, as well as why you think it exemplifies your chosen quote. Include the quotes and an explanation of why you felt each quote from the story is significant, or why it spoke to you. The written part does not need to be in an essay format – you may number each paragraph to correspond with each slide. You will need a Works Cited page for the book only - trying to cite Google images is a nightmare.

Your typed portion is due by Friday at 4:00. Please post your powerpoint by 4:00 on the public network in the folder entitled “The Road.” Your name should be the name of your powerpoint file.

Here is the inspiration for the project – a review from Esquire of the film:

“The third major cast member of The Road is the setting itself, the world. The film's locations were perhaps the least well-kept secrets in the marketplace of prerelease Web sites about the movie. "Initially we were talking about [filming in] Australia or Iceland," Hillcoat says. "But all of our research took us to looking at images of events like Mount St. Helens, the volcanoes in the Philippines, Hiroshima, Katrina, a set of man-made and natural disasters that have been heavily photographed and filmed. My production designer, sitting in the countryside in Victoria, Australia, found eight miles of abandoned freeway in Pennsylvania on Google Earth, which gave us those dark tunnels. We deliberately used America's real apocalyptic zones. We went to New Orleans to shoot our interior shots in a ruined shopping mall in post-Katrina New Orleans. We used the strip mines in western Pennsylvania. Even billowing clouds in the background of one scene come from 9/11.

"When they pass through a city, there's a shot of two ships sitting on a freeway that looks like a visual effect. That is an actual IMAX 70mm shot taken days after Katrina. We had to doctor the image, grunge it up, make it more toxic, set it into our world, but these places were not hard to find. There's a fair amount of devastation already in the American landscape."

“You don't recognize these presences as some timely message from our near past, as heralds of warning. Like the father and son, the scenes — the forgotten 18-wheeler jackknifed on a freeway bridge, the gas stations littered with useless contraptions, the sinister farmhouses, the sheds with their hand tools piled like ancient contrivances — all of it calls up the now. Grunged and toxic, sure, but sickeningly familiar. You cannot recognize enough to say where this is, but you recognize it. All of it” (Chiarella).