The Down and Dirty Way to Make an Animated Book Cover
Do you judge a book by a cover? I know that I shouldn’t, but I do. In fact, I have strong opinions about covers. For example, I like original artwork far more than photos from movie versions.
[image error]I’ll admit I like the one on the left better!
Lately, I’ve been jealously eyeing other authors’ animated book covers. They remind me of the book covers in Harry Potter.
Anyway…I wanted an animated cover for my own book, Stage Fright. Since I’m a financially challenged writer, I figured the best way to go about this was to create my own.
I used the tools I had on hand. My software included Moviemaker, Gimp, and Inkspace (all free!) To make the animation, I used a copy of the current cover and created a second cover without the vampire face. Then I put the images side-by-side in Moviemaker, using a fade transition which makes the vampire’s face come out of nowhere (kinda sorta using a stop-motion effect.) And voila! a short movie was made.
Once I liked how the cover looked, I uploaded it into Giphy to create a gif. I know that this is nowhere as cool as the professional animated covers that I’ve seen, but it was very easy, not too time-consuming, and a lot of fun.
Here’s the final product:
