Marie Michelle Coleman's Blog, page 4

Creating a Book Trailer: Tools and Images

Lights, Camera, Action! You aren't going to pay anyone to do your trailer. You're going to do it all yourself.  You've done your homework (see my prior post: Creating a Book Trailer: Getting Started) and you understand the pros and cons of a DIY trailer (see my prior post: Creating a Book Trailer: Why Do It Yourself?).

While your creative juices are sloshing around in your head, you need to consider a few practical matters that are basic to producing your trailer.

What tool you will use to create the trailer?

I narrowed it down to two applications :  Windows Live Movie Maker and Photo Story 3 for Windows. I gave them both a try to see what worked best for me. Both of these applications are easy to use, provide a lot of capabilities for creating a professional quality book trailer, and they are free. I could have gone with either and gotten a nice end product.

Photo Story 3 for Windows uses a step-by-step approach to building a trailer. On Photo Story 3 you start by importing all the pictures you want to use so that they appear in a filmstrip along the bottom of the tool and these images can be reordered and individually edited. You can rotate, crop, correct color levels, and integrate some special effects for your images. You can also easily add text for each slide and music for the whole trailer. If you like a step-by-step approach to building your trailer and you want to do some very simple photo editing in your application instead of before you pull your photos in, this program might be for you.

Windows Live Movie Maker does a little less hand holding and gives less in-application editing capabilities for your photos but it has a couple of advantages that make up for that.  Instead of a little filmstrip at the bottom of the tool, it provides a nice big storyboard on the right that allows you to easily see all your slides and makes reordering them a snap. Because I wasn’t forced to go step-by-step, it was really easy for me to preview my work at every stage. The preview window is larger than in Photo Story 3 and because it doesn't open up in a new small preview window, you can work with small parts of your movie very effectively. I also liked the animations (transitions, pans and zooms) and visual effects in Windows Live Movie Maker although it does take a little time to figure out how to access all these capabilities (from the tabs along the top). Since I prefer to do my photo edits before pulling my images into my application, I don’t care that Windows Live Movie Maker doesn’t give you as much ability to edit photos as Photo Story 3. What I do like is being able to mouse over each slide and see every transition, effect, and the timing right from the storyboard.  For me, Windows Live Movie Maker was the best choice.

Where will you get your images/video?

I always carry my camera around.  It annoys my family at times (okay – it annoys them regularly) but I don’t care. I’m taking the picture. Deal with it.  This penchant for picture-taking came in handy for this project. I was able to use some of my own photos in my book trailer. Even with thousands of pictures in my photo archives, I only had so many images that were just right for the trailer. I needed to find more. Whether you have your own images to pull from or not, it's worth exploring possible images for your trailer that didn't come from your own camera. It will keep you from being constrained by the set of images you have at hand.

Of course, you can check out Flickr’s Creative Commons images but you have to be careful that you understand the licensing for each image and you are going to need to provide attribution. I had great luck with Morguefile and was impressed with the quality of the images and the no fuss approach to accessing, using, and altering these photos. And no requirement for attribution. I would kiss the folks at Morguefile if I could. Here’s some info from their FAQ:  “This morgue file contains free high resolution digital stock photographs and reference images for either corporate or public use. The purpose of this site is to provide free image reference material for illustrators, comic book artist, designers, teachers and all creative pursuits.”(from Morguefile FAQ).  You can also take a look at  their licensing agreement. I found great photos at Morguefile that I could manipulate to my heart’s content for the purposes of my book trailer. I learned about Morguefile over at Author Culture.

You can also use stock images. I like iStock. Although I didn’t use it for this project, I have used iStock before and been very happy with their images.

Next time:  In my next post I'll take about the script and audio aspects of your book trailer.

Creating a Book Trailer: Why Do It Yourself?

You been considering the virtues of a book trailer and you think you want to put one together yourself. That’s the path that I decided to take too. I didn’t come to that decision lightly. I spent plenty of time watching trailers and learning what other people had to say about the process of producing their own trailer before I committed to the effort. Take a look at my prior post for some of the initial steps I took before making my decision:  Creating a Book Trailer:  Getting Started.

Why Do It Yourself?

You’re in control (and writers tend to like that when it comes to their books).  You get to devise the look and feel of the trailer – images, script, sound, length, and everything in between. It will cost you time and effort but it will save you money. It is my opinion that if you have a good eye for this sort of thing and do your homework ahead of time, then you can knock something out that will look professional and help you promote your book more effectively. I also found the process of putting my trailer together to be a lot of fun. It allowed me to be stretch my creative muscles and made me think about my book from a different perspective.

Why Let Someone Else Create Your Trailer?

 You might want to hand the task over to a professional if you:

can’t dedicate the time and energy required to put a trailer together
don’t enjoy searching out and working with images/video
hate the idea of gearing up on applications you will need to create your trailer such as Photo Story 3 or Windows Live Movie Maker
get stressed just thinking about where and how to post your book trailer once it’s finished.

Negatives:  This approach is going to cost you and you are going to lose some creative control.

My Take on the Bottom Line

Paying someone else to do your trailer can be very costly–the kind of costly that will make you think twice about doing a trailer at all even if you don't wind up gravitating towards the high end of the price scale. I would rather spend some money on having a professional knock out a killer cover for me than a book trailer. The cover is key. I know that covers sell books because they make a difference to me as a reader – they attract or repel me in a glance in the brick and mortar bookstore and when I am buying an ebook on the web. I have bought books based on a good cover. I feel confident that I am not alone in that. An eye-catching cover is a going to give you a great bang for your buck and having a professional create one with some real kick to it is going to be easier on the budget than springing for someone to do your trailer. I say put some money into your cover and do your trailer on your own.

I was able to find a graphic artist who put together a custom cover that makes my heart sing every time I look at it. He did the cover for a reasonable price and I had a lot of say about what I wanted that cover to be. He really respected my vision. The cover also does double duty because I used it in the book trailer. If you are creating your trailer before you have released your book, get your cover done in time to add to your trailer.