Book Trailers as Video Taglines: Start With Story

Posted on 7:22 am in Video | 0 comments

Your book trailer will be the outcome of the story you’re going to tell and what resources you have. And the story I’m talking about is NOT the one you’ve already written but the one ABOUT what you’ve already written.

Without a story, production value means nothing. I’m sure you can think of movies that had small budgets but made a big impact at the box office because they were simply good stories. And, undoubtedly, you can think of a few big budget flops that failed to capture viewers’ imaginations despite the bling.

True, your video will be watched online, not in a theater, so what’s the difference?

The difference is that your viewers are not highly motivated to watch or like what they see. It was free, right? Your viewers haven’t invested anything that would make them try to “get their money’s worth” or make them want to give the video every chance lest they’ve wasted time in your world. In fact, it’s likely your book trailer is playing on a computer while they have other websites open or the television on or co-workers chatting with them.

What’s all that mean? You need to grab their attention in a way none of those others things do.

What grabs your attention online? Slick graphics? Exciting animation? Sure, but you see that in sidebars and dismiss it as advertising. Or it pops up in headers to become background noise for the content that really interests you. My point is that production value can get a viewer’s attention but only quality content can keep it.

The quality content you have to offer is story.

What Kind of Story?

By the time you’re ready to create a book trailer, you’ve probably already written a synopsis and blurbs, loglines, or taglines of various lengths. You know…summarize your novel in 200 words, 50 words, 10 words. This should help you condense your work so that you’re ready to write a story about the story.

Consider the kind of story. As I mentioned in the first part of this series, you’ll want to create a story for your book trailer that reflects the book you’ve written. You might be a naturally funny person, but if the book is horror, an interview with you cutting wise may not be the best approach. Or it may be.  This is art, after all, not science. As a reader, I can tell you I want to get an idea of the quality and content of a book from the trailer. That means a funny author could impress me with his cleverness but might also mislead me into thinking his horror novel is really a satire.

For my recent book trailer, I chose to convey Darklaw through images from its fantasy world. I wanted to show the reader the vastness of the world building and share the sense of adventure to be found there. I also wanted to convey the erotic content. So I chose images of portraits and maps, war and sex and assembled it with a blend of mysterious and driving musical themes. Details of the story appear in short text phrases from my synopsis.

First Steps

Once you have an idea of the kind of trailer you plan to make—how you want to present your novel—it’s time to acquire content.

You probably think the simplest approach is the interview. You talk about your book on camera. Try it. Try it three times. Watch it. It sucks. To do a good interview about your book, you need to have a script, or at least notes. You need to practice, so you don’t “um” and “ah”. You need to have a certain presence on camera. And then, you’ll probably need to hire someone else to do it instead.

Even if you do an interview, you’ll want to include at least a few images, animations, other video, sounds, or music. Necessary content includes an image of your book cover and logos of publisher/website. If you can’t create this content, you’ll have to find people who can. You can find all these items free or often at low cost.

A Word about Copyright

Follow it. Don’t think of the website as a faceless corporation with bean counters taking an unfair cut from creative people’s sweat (although they do). Every creative on the web is some artist’s work. Use the creative—whether image, animation, video, sound, or music—as it is allowed by the end user agreement. Every site will have information about how you may use a creative. Sometimes it’s free with or without attribution; sometimes it costs money. If you do steal something, likely you’ll never get caught, but you’re an artist, too, and undoubtedly there’s some Russian website already posting and selling your work. They’ll never be stopped, either.

Finding Resources

You may have a vision of how your trailer will look or you may not. Either way, the resources you find and can afford will affect the final product. In other words, you may not achieve your glorious vision because you don’t have $100 for that awesome moon photo. Or maybe because you found that awesome moon photo, you decide to design your whole trailer around it.

If you’re not familiar with perusing stock sites, here are a few tips:

1. Always read the copyright or usage sections. Sometimes this is in one location for the entire site’s content. Sometimes, usage is associated with each creative for sites with various kinds of rights-regulated content. (You’ll want to avoid any creatives that require royalty payments. You won’t likely find many of these. Most are “royalty-free”…uh, that doesn’t mean “free”.)
2. IMAGES/VIDEO: Most pay sites now use a credit approach. You spend $10 and get like 2-5 credits. Different images and sizes cost different credits.
3. IMAGES/VIDEO: When you click an image you like, it pops up as a “comp” image, which is a small draft or proof image with the site’s watermark on it. The idea is you use this in your layout to get an idea what it looks like. If you like it, you go buy the larger, watermark-free image for the final project. SOUND/MUSIC:  The “comp” creatives in this category are usually short clips, have inserted interruptions, or are downsampled from the original.
4. Create a free account on each site where you like the images. This is so you can store lots of comp images online, because you won’t use all of them and may not be sure yet which you want. If you prefer, you can store them on your computer, but be sure to label where they came from so you can go purchase the large, clean copy if you want it.
5. IMAGE: When you’re ready to purchase, the only image size you’ll need to worry about is the smallest, for “web”, so don’t worry about some of those prices. Most images come in various sizes for different needs. The bigger/more detailed/more expensive versions are for print. VIDEO: There’s great variety here. I’m going to show you how to put together a 1280×720 video—a High Definition (“HD”) MPEG-4 compatible with Youtube. That means you should avoid video clips that are as small as 640×480 (those numbers are in pixels—I’ll get to that next post). Most other sizes can be scaled without too much loss.
6. Grab all the images you like as comps and put them in your “lightbox” (as some sites call it) or in your account.

Next Steps

1. The sites for content are nearly endless, and the list I provide below is small to get you started. If you want more, use Google. Search for “stock photos”, “art images”, etc. If you search for anything using “free,” you’ll have to be careful with the results (see below).
2. Be wary of sites with free anything. Sure, you can find good sites with free images and music, but some of the sites are infected with malware, whether the site owners know it or not. If you get a pop-up that you’ve got a dozen viruses and trojans, you probably don’t, but you’ll have a hell of a time trying to remove that invitation to purchase a cleaning program.  Also, some sites have a mix of free and pay, and they survive on your not being able to tell the difference until you fall in love with an image. If you don’t have the money, don’t even look. Pay images are almost always of better quality—in lay-out, color, size.
3. Don’t get too locked into a vision of the finished product or of a single image. Much will depend on how all the pieces of the project come together–those pieces being: what images/video and music/sound you find and can afford and the technical ability you possess or can afford to pay for.

In the next part of this series, I’ll talk about the technical aspects of making a video interview and setting parameters for your book trailer project in Adobe Photoshop and Premiere.

A Few Resources

Images

iStockPhoto http://www.istockphoto.com/

Big Stock Photo http://www.bigstockphoto.com/

Morgue File http://morguefile.com/ Free, no attribution required but requested

Stock Vault http://www.stockvault.net/ Some free

Free Images http://www.freeimages.co.uk/ Free with attribution

Free Stock Photos http://freestockphotos.com/ Free with attribution

Video

Revo Stock http://www.revostock.com/

iStockPhoto http://www.istockphoto.com/

Animations

Active Den http://activeden.net/

I’m not a fan of animated gifs or most Flash animation that isn’t custom-made. Plus, too many of those sites are infected. If you’d like to do a more cartoon-looking video, you can peruse anything you Google under “free flash animations” but be careful. Better yet, learn Flash through a single class at your local community college.

Backgrounds

CG Textures http://www.cgtextures.com/ Free with limited usage per day

Grunge Textures http://www.grungetextures.com/ Free

Urban Dirty http://urbandirty.com/ Free

Music & Sound Effects

Purple Planet http://www.purple-planet.com/ Free with attribution, donation suggested

Partners in Rhyme http://www.partnersinrhyme.com/ Some free

Sound Dogs http://www.sounddogs.com/

Tutorials & Brushes

RNEL http://www.rnel.net/tutorials/Photoshop Free

Photoshop Roadmap http://www.photoshoproadmap.com/ Free

Brush King http://www.brushking.eu/ Free, donation suggested