The first time I saw a movie-style trailer for a book was for Carrie Ryan's Forest of Hands and Teeth. I thought hey, this would be a great way to promote a book! Here was a way to bring part of that book to life and make it a little more real for the reader. Cool! So I started looking at other people's trailers, both professional and non-professional.
Yikes!
Let me preface my next comments with this--I'm not a professional by any means. As I mentioned in my first post, I dabble in video editing with Final Cut and some 3D animation...I guess you could call it a hobby. I can understand the not everyone can afford to go out and rent the latest Red 4K digital movie camera or get enough people in costume together to act out a scene. But there are some common sense things that I have noticed about the amateur book trailers that stand out at me and I wanted to pass along a few things that I learned with the making of my trailer. These are my thoughts and opinions only, please take them for what they're worth, and I'll try break them down succinctly.
Content
A lot of amateur trailers I've seen are basically wholesale copyright infringement. I'm not going to name names, but one trailer I saw was a John Mayer music video with what sounded like a Christina Perri song playing over it. Another was made up of clips from the movie Underworld, again with what sounded like a professionally recorded song playing on top. In my mind, this goes way beyond what could be described as fair use and there is the potential here for the publishers of these videos to be sued by the RIAA or MPAA. Again, I understand that not everyone can afford equipment or actors or to pay licensing fees, but you have to think of it this way--if someone was flashing up excerpts from your book without crediting you, would you be happy? Probably not. I know if someone took the cover from The Spring of Seduction, cropped out the book title and my name, I'd be none too happy.So where can you get content without going broke? Here's a few sites that I've found that offer content for free, cheap, or reasonable prices. One special note--PLEASE read the licensing agreements on these sites. Some are very liberal and other than reselling their content, they allow you to use whatever you download from their site however you please. Others, especially the pay sites, are more restrictive on how, where, and how many times their content can be used.
- CGTextures.com - This site offers pictures for download that are primarily intended for using in CGI (Computer Generated Imagery) for movies or games to add texture to 3D models. Their license agreement allows use of their content in movies, on websites, in games, just as long as you're not reselling them outside of your project. There are plenty of pictures here, from animals, landscapes, or cityscapes, to closeups of fabrics, steel, concrete, and other materials. You do have to create an account with them, but unless you're going to be downloading over 15 MB a day in pictures, the site is free. I used a few of their pictures to texture the lighthouse in my video.
- StockFuel.com - StockFuel offers stock music, photos, video, vector art, as well Adobe Flash and After Effects content. The site uses the credits system where you have to buy blocks of credits before you download anything. Prices are reasonable, though you will have to use more credits for higher resolution photos or the ability to use their content for TV or movies.
- PremiumBeat.com - Excellent site for stock music and sound effects. There's no credit system here, everything is paid a la carte. You can get professional sounding pieces of music for very reasonable prices, again you'll pay more depending on usage. The music I used for my own trailer came from Premium Beats.
- Freesound.org - The mother lode for free sound effects! Do you need the sound of birds chirping, cows mooing, screams, jackhammers, or even jelly wobbling on a plate? This is the place to come. Yes, you have to register, but it's free. Most of the content is under a Creative Commons license, free to use how you see fit, but check the individual sound's license just to be sure.
- Flickr.com - A great place to go through photos uploaded by other users. To the right of each photo is how the photo is licensed - most are copyright the original uploader and may not be used (some allow you to request a license to use the photo) but others are generous enough to release their pictures under the creative commons license for free use. Please be sure to credit the owner of the photo as a courtesy to them.
Putting It All Together
Okay, you have your video clips, pictures, music, sound effects, etc. all together. Now you have to put it together into a video.
- Windows Movie Maker - If you're running Windows XP, you'll have this installed already. If you're running Windows Vista/7/8, head on over to http://windows.microsoft.com/is-is/windows/get-movie-maker-download and download Movie Maker from there. Movie Maker comes with a nice selection of title and transition effects and lets you add music and/or sound effects to your videos. Once you're done, it will allow you share directly to Facebook or Youtube. Alternatively, you can save your movie to your hard drive as a file and upload it to your webpage. Everything is drag-and-drop so it's very easy to use.
- iMovie - If you run a Mac, chances are you have iMovie installed. If not, it's available from the Mac App Store for a very reasonable price. It has the features of Windows Movie Maker and a whole lot more. iMovie is just as easy to use as its Window's counterpart, if not easier. It's been a while since I used iMovie but I believe once you're done it gives you the option of uploading to Facebook and Youtube.
- Final Cut Pro X - Okay, this one is a little expensive. Available for the Mac only, it runs $299 from the Mac App Store - keep your receipts for tax time! However, for just under $400 you are getting a professional video/movie editor that contains a ton of features like pro-grade titles and transitions as well as a library of stock content. It's surprisingly easy to use though there will be a learning curve if you want to take advantage of some of its niftier features. But if you're really feeling adventurous and have a little money set aside, grab your green screen and have a little fun with all that you can do. Considering comparable packages from Adobe or Avid run in the thousands of dollars, this is the closest that many of us will get to professional-grade video editing.
- Pinnacle Studio - This is a mid-level video editing program for Windows. I haven't used it in a few years since I discovered Final Cut, but it's a reasonably easy to use piece of software with plenty of title/transition effect and output options. The one thing that bugged me about the Pinnacle series was that they advertised all the cool things you could do and all the neat effects that you could use. Unfortunately, a lot of those effects are available for purchase separately so their a la carte approach to software grew tiresome after a while. But if you want more power than Windows Movie Maker but don't want to run out and buy a Mac, this is a good option. Visit http://www.pinnaclesys.com/publicsite/us/home/ for more details.
Things to Consider
- Length of the trailer - I've seen a few that run five minutes or more in length with text endlessly flashing up or scrolling across the screen. I think I've read whole books in some of these trailers...but I digress. Think about a movie trailer--what is its purpose? It's to show you snippets from the movie in a reasonable amount of time, to grab your attention and get you excited but not give too much away at the same time. Plus let's face it, you're dealing with the Internet here, the Land of Short Attention Spans. I like trailers that run about two minutes, give or take thirty seconds. This is a personal preference, I know, but I think any longer than two minutes thirty seconds and you run the risk of people looking at their watches or just quitting the video out of boredom.
- Credit where credit is due - I said it before but it bears repeating. If you use someone's content, unless they don't require you to credit them, it's best to be courteous and do so.
- Is it really necessary? Ask yourself this question repeatedly. Putting together a trailer can be time consuming. In the time that it took me to model and render out the CGI alone, I probably could have finished the prequel series to Shelter from the Winter that I'm working on. To me it was a proof-that-I-could-do-it thing. It's not perfect, there's a few rough edges that if I could work on it full time rather than doing my day job, I could probably get ironed out. But it was a labour of love, I like how it turned out, so I'm happy with it and I hope other people like it enough where it makes them want to buy my books. But some of you may want to forget about the trailer and focus more on your social network/blog presence, which is probably more valuable anyway.
Those are my tips and thoughts on the book trailer. I hope this is of some help to anyone out there considering doing the same thing. If you have a trailer or are working on one, feel free to post in the comments section, I'd love to hear about your experiences.
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