Building a Book Trailer on a Shoestring Budget (pt 3)

It’s not so Painful, and It’s Looking Better

Welcome back. You’ve persevered this week, and have all of your slides made. Things are looking up, and you’re feeling pretty good about yourself. You should. Getting this far is a lot of hard work with some blood, sweat, and tears mixed in to make it all come together.

Now, we’re going to start arranging your slides. Open your movie (film) making software, and start importing your images. Don’t worry about what order they are in, right now we just need them all in one place.

I recommend using the video software that comes with your computer, like Microsoft Movie Maker because you can make the trailer as long as you need to without worrying over membership fees you might incur to get longer clips from the online video makers. Also, I think it gives you a little more flexibility. At least, compared with my experience on animoto.com it does.

Once you have all of your slides imported, go ahead and arrange them into the order you’re thinking of. For mine, the first 6 slides would look like this:

I think you can see how the tale is developing in the slides. Once you have the slides in order, then it is time to think about what music you want to use. This is another critical step in your process. I prefer to use instrumental only, though some have successfully used music with lyrics. This is a personal choice. Just be aware that anything with lyrics will distract your audience from the words you are going to be adding. So, think about that when you make your choice.

A couple of good places that I have been referred to for royalty free music are:

Be sure to read their requirements for the pieces you choose to use.

Some only require you to provide proper credit, others may require a small fee to use the music. I’ve been very luck to find all of my music on incompetech, which has helped me preserve the overall feel of the trailers, which adds to my brand.

Once you have selected your music and downloaded it, it’s time to import it into your developing video. I’m not sure how Mac’s do this, but with Windows Movie Maker, it’s a simple add music. Your slides should automatically have a display time now. Click through them, and make sure that you have at LEAST a five second view time on each of them. Anything less, and your readers probably won’t be able to read your text, or they’ll ignore the images. You don’t want either of these cases to happen.

I’m going to sign off, and let you take a break before we tackle the last finiky bits of your trailer. Next time we’ll get into adding the text that I know you’ve been dying to add, and ensuring everything is timed appropriately.

In the meantime, until the next time (Sunday 26th April), happy writing!

Kat