Creating a Book Trailer: Scripting and Audio
In my last post: Creating a Book Trailer: Tools and Images, I concentrated on two basic aspects of creating your book trailer: the application you'll use to build the trailer and the images that you'll use in creating it. In this post, I want to cover the rest of the nuts and bolts that go into finishing up your book trailer.
What will the script for your trailer look like?
Writing the script that will appear with your images is challenging. It’s not the back of a book blurb. It’s not a pitch. Although you could steal a little language from both. It’s a piece of a multimedia effort and that makes drafting the script a unique sort of writing experience. The blend of images, text, and audio will engage your potential reader on several levels at once. It’s very exciting but it gives you more to think about as you consider the text against the backdrop of your carefully selected and edited images. You want the two together (with the audio laid over them) to pack a real punch. Since the trailer is a short little movie, you have to make sure that the text that goes with your images is tightly crafted so that it is easy to read at the same time that the viewer is taking in the images behind your words. I know this is a little shocking for a writer to say but I’ll say it anyway: The images in a book trailer are as important as the words.
What’s the best process? Do you pick the images first and then write the script or do you write the script first and then pick the images? I started with the images because I had a visual sense of what I wanted to convey in the trailer. After I looked at the flow of my slides on the storyboard, I wrote the entire script. Looking at them both together provided me with a very clear perspective on how to fine tune both my text and my images (including adding and deleting slides). At this point I was able to fit the text to each slide and tweak the timing and transitions for each individual slide. Keep in mind that for each slide you are going to want to consider the image transition, zoom and pan as well as the text effects. And yes, this part it time consuming but necessary.
How will you integrate audio into your trailer?
I’m big into the power of music to set the mood. I like music in a trailer and I think that picking the right music can really make a difference in the professional feel of your finished book trailer. When you have the images and text set out in just the way you like it, you need to go hunting for the music that will be the icing on the cake for your trailer.
Unless you are a composer, you are going to have to track down some royalty-free music. I have used two sites for royalty free music: Opuzz and PremiumBeat. I prefer PremiumBeat because it is so easy to pick a genre and begin sampling pieces one after another in a quick and efficient manner. Because it is so easy to move from one sample to another on PremiumBeat, I felt like I was able to explore a wide range of options. While I sampled the music, I ran my video so I could see how they blended together. It made me much more confident in the selection process. After picking four tracks that I thought were good fits for my trailer, I was able to download mp3 samples from PremiumBeat and add them into my video so I could get the full effect and compare them against each other. I think this is important because sometimes it is the way the music hits at a certain part of the video that makes it work just right.
The Final Step – Get Some Feedback
Sit some people down and have them watch the trailer with you. Just like with your novel, you have to get some feedback. Let them watch it once without comment and then run it through a second time so they can give you some detailed feedback on specific portions/slides. This really paid off for me. This is how I discovered that I needed to knock a few slides out of the deck (slides I loved but weren’t really necessary). It's also how I figured out where the timing problems were, learned what images people loved and which didn’t quite work the way I thought they should, and realized that some slides needed to have font size/color switched up to make them more readable. You can't trust yourself to get all this right. You know it too well. Other people's viewing experience is going to be quite different from yours. They may not know anything about your story or the genre.The may have never seen a book trailer before. That's all good for you. They are going to tell you some interesting (and maybe suprising) things about your trailer down to the smallest details. It's amazing what people get from a video versus the written word. You need to hear and pay attention to these comments--positive and negative. They are going to give you the information you need to properly fine-tune your trailer.
Since I think the audio is such an important aspect of a book trailer, I also let people view four different versions of the trailer with the four different pieces of music I had settled on. It was very interesting to see how the music changed people’s reaction to the trailer. There were a couple pieces that worked well with my images but the music actually changed the viewer's expectation of what they would be getting when they began reading the book. I had chosen one track that had a powerful movie soundtrack feel to it. Everyone love it. But we all agreed that it wouldn't work in the end. The music was so powerful but it gave the wrong impression. My book is a paranormal romance not a thriller. Taking time to have my beta viewers give me their impression of the trailer with a few different audio samples gave me confidence in my final music choice.
Good luck on creating your book trailer!
