I have been working on a book trailer for my new fantasy novel, The Light Heart of Stone.
If you haven’t come across book trailers before, you might like to have a quick look at a few examples:
Stunningly beautiful – the New Zealand Book Council’s trailer for Going West by Maurice Gee
Great fun – 13 Words by Lemony Snicket and Maira Kalman
Simple but effective – Alison Goodman’s trailer for Eon and Eona;
Movie-like –The Black Prism by Brent Weeks
Author focused – Machine Man by Max Barry
And then there are plenty of others that are awkwardly amateur, which I’m sure you can find without any help from me.
My focus has been to create a no cost trailer that is not awkwardly amateur.
I have been building the trailer using photographs and freehand drawings, which I have assembled using free software – Photo Story 3 for Windows and Windows Movie Maker (not the Live version). I created three scenes for my book trailer by combining the drawings and photos in Photo Story.
Photo Story has a good zooming and panning features, giving the illusion of movement (take another look at Alison Goodman’s trailer to see what I mean). I imported my three scenes – in effect mini movies – into Movie Maker, which seems to have more options than Photo Story for adding audio and controlling the output of the final trailer.
I did much of this preliminary work while Will and I were in Spain so the photos are all Spanish and feature a cork tree from Extremadura (above) and various images from Catalonia. I assembled a rough version of the trailer while we were in Cadaques. The resulting trailer worked reasonably well but I found that the photos and freehand drawings didn’t connect well with the artwork on The Light Heart of Stone’s cover.
The cover artwork was created in Corel Draw and has a coloured and stylised, almost cartoon-like, feel; the trailer, even though it contains drawings, felt far too real.
And the solution…? I think the solution involves creating some digital artwork to link each scene and the cover. I hope the new artwork will marry the real and the unreal elements in the trailer, but I have to admit that I have broken my “no cost trailer” rule by buying a Wacom Bamboo drawing tablet.
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