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.