T is for Trailers

 

There are times when writing full time gets tedious, and I turn to other things. In amongst the online jigsaws and sudokus, I find time to potter with Photoshop and Windows MovieMaker.

MovieMaker Live was brilliant. Then some dick at Microsoft decided to tinker with it, changed it all out of recognition and it crashes every two minutes, so I reverted to an earlier version. I can’t do as much with it as I could MM Live, but it’s adequate for turning out book trailers.

The trailers are not Oscar material. They’re essentially a string of photographs, each with a caption or tagline, which adds to the intrigue of the titles they cover.

And just to show you what I mean, here are three trailers for Sanford 3rd Age Club Mysteries.

First: The Filey Connection.

 

And next up is A Murder for Christmas.

 

Finally A Halloween Homicide.

 

Each trailer takes about two days to prepare. Installing the pictures is the easy bit. Writing the captions and then marrying them to the music is the tricky part of the equation. Finally I deal with the transitions, and MM offers a whole range of them… not as many as I’d like, but what the hell. You can’t everything for free.

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The Filey Connection, first of the Sanford 3rd Age Club Mysteries, from Crooked {Cat} Books is available for the Kindle from Amazon UK and Amazon Worldwide and in all other formats from Smashwords