In today’s competitive market, it seems one just can’t sit on a corner going ‘Hey YOU, buy my stuff!”. No sir-ree. Nowadays, it’s all about instant gratification, shortening attention spans, and pretty pictures!
Well I’m here to provide you all of that! May I present to you the book trailer for Angelic Visions! (After this, it’ll just be boring ‘this is how I made it’ stuff, so go watch, WATCH IT NOW!) Marketing experts say I have to have one and I’m inclined to agree!
It feels good to arrive at this point, as if all my hard work in promoting the book has culminated in this shiny musical moving box. Gone are the days when we would have relied on the power of printed adverts and mailings to get the most word-of-mouth going for our products! Now it’s all YouTube and FB and their wildly viral power over the populace! Or at least, this is what I’m expecting after this video (I shall be watching the trickle-down effect of this video like a hawk!)
I’ve gotta say that making my own trailer took less time than I thought (not counting the time I spent pondering on what elements make a good book trailer and watching over a dozen to get an idea of what I wanted to do).
And here is random list of things I learned while working on this project!:
- Do not use famous celebrities because that just screams “I got this from Google images”
- Do not go longer than 2 minutes or your audience will get bored (unless you have a very good reason to go on because it’s just SO riveting!)
- There are barely any book trailers out there for art instruction books (minus books on quilting. There are SO many book trailers that have to do with quilting, oddly.) This means WE NEED TO MAKE MORE! Fill that niche! Interactive illustration is definitely catching on these days.
- A professionally shot book trailer (with actors, music, etc.) apparently goes for $20k! Maybe once I’m a hit, I’ll consider this full package service…maybe.
As for my own trailer’s creative development, I spent about a day pondering on how best to put words to images, what images to use, and what music would go best, which culminated in the creation of this super high tech storyboard scribbled in my art pad!
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| I SWEAR this wasn’t written by a chicken. |
Translation – the stick figures are hints of which art I thought might work best with the arrows representing which way I wanted the camera to pan across the art. In the making, the trailer didn’t really deviate from what I had here. Short, sweet, and to the point!
Picking the music was the easy part. I knew I wanted something unobtrusive that didn’t compete with the artwork, but still interesting enough to hold a viewer’s attention. I also knew I wanted something in the vein of Gregorian Chant, which fits angelic themes so perfectly! Luckily, I had just the song in mind from my previous dabblings in video editing, where I stumbled upon the royalty free music site of Kevin MacLeod! He offers his music free of charge in exchange for publicity and an optional donation.
After that, it really was a matter of looking at online tutorials on my video editing software (a program called PowerDirector which came with my camcorder) and playing around with it till it looked right. I’d already fashioned a video earlier (
Song of Exile Walkthrough) to help get my feet wet with learning the ropes.
And so, a trailer is born! I may do a few more small video promos, but for now, this one is the Humdinger, the Mothership, my newborn Frankenstein!
I do hope you enjoy it and let me know what you think!
