Making My First Book Trailer

When I saw my first book trailer on YouTube some time ago, it started the itch.  I wanted to make trailers too, for all my books. Unfortunately, there were problems.  I had no resources to film the kind of trailers that first came to mind.  While I could script and come up with settings, I had no actors.  Most of my stories are YA, so ideally I would like to find a collection of dramatically oriented high school aged people in my local area.  I put out some feelers, but nothing happened.

There are, however, trailers that seem to be slide shows, with music and floating blurb text.  I could certainly do one of those, but I wanted something better.  My first attempt was a hybrid, with all the video being scenes from Google Earth, with a character voice behind it–the person ‘driving’ the computer screen.  This was for the novel Falling Bakward.  I put together the video, but again, I was unable to come up with an actor to be the voice of Jerry Ingram.  I still may do that one, when it all comes together.

But, for my latest novel, Follow That Mouse, I took a different tack.  The only voice I could count on was my own.  I had the photos I took while researching the locale for the story.  The only thing I needed was a script.  This time, I didn’t try to stage anything.  This was me, the author, talking about the book and how it came to be.  The hardest thing to do was to trim down the images to make a short, one minute trailer, so that it wasn’t boring.

iMovie on my mac did a decent job making the still images into a video montage, and I retreated to my RV to record my voiceover track with a minimum of background noise.  I didn’t have to make too many false starts to put it together. It’s hardly professional film-making, but I’m content.  I’d rather make the second one that go back and tweak this one.

All I need is another idea.