All I can do
is speak from experience. It took me quite a while to figure out how to make a
video book trailer--like many months to figure it out. I mean, ideally, I knew what I wanted it to
look like, and every idea I came up with was impossible. The first video booktrailer I made was for my full-length young adult novel, “Destined Love is
Immortal.” It sells as both an ebook and
a paperback on Amazon. The story is a paranormal
romance/adventure that takes place in Belgium and the main characters are a
sixteen year-old girl and an ancient war god.
Now, if my
book were a movie, I’d cast actor Steve Byers (“Alphas” & “Catch a
Christmas Star”) as the lead, a war god, Camulos. I’ve no idea who I’d want cast as the
girl. Obviously, I can’t film Steve
Byers for my book trailer, and more unfortunately, I’m not best friends with
anyone who looks anything like him. In
fact, none of the men I know around here who would willingly do me the favor of
posing with swords for a photo shoot out of the goodness of their hearts are
even the right age.
By the way,
did I mention that I live in Missouri?
Moreover, I live in a resort town.
We don’t have the older buildings like you’d find on the East Coast. It hardly looks like Belgium. So that left me in quandary. Who and what would I photograph?
My book
video trailer, which you can find here, is a photo montage. All the pictures were taken by either me or
my son, and they span twenty-five years.
I’m
fortunate to have traveled in Europe when I was younger, and for some of the
photos of scenery, I used what I deemed to be appropriate vacation photos as
the base picture. By base picture, I
mean the initial, unaltered photo, as most, but not all, of the pictures in my video trailer have been
heavily modified through photo-modification software that comes standard on
many PCs.
Other
pictures, like those representing a cave or cliff face required a bit more
creativity on my part. I had to look at
my surroundings and think of them in terms of close-ups rather than the bigger
picture. For example, the cliff faces
and bare rocks in my video trailer are actually where the rock was cut out
along the highway so that the road could go through. The girl in the pictures, well, that’s me, in
a wig, and photo-edited to look younger. I know I don't look sixteen below, but I certainly look younger and I was trying to show the idea of a younger girl, not exactly how my character would appear.
"Destined Love is Immortal" also has a lion-sacrifice scene in it as well as a few mythical monsters. To get photographs for those, I visited my local zoo and clicked away. That's the beauty of digital photography--you can take an enormous number of pictures, hoping to get the right one, without the expense of wasting film.
After
picking photos, I spent a significant amount of time modifying them in
Paint. Obviously, Photoshop would be
better, but it’s not an inexpensive software, I don’t already own it, and it
wasn’t in the budget. Photoshop is also
much more difficult to use than Paint.
So, I pulled these photos into paint, cropped them, and played with the
different photo options, like making them look like drawings, paintings, etc. With enough modification, and carefully
chosen camera angles where the focus is on the action and not the faces of my models,
I think the result turned out quite well.
More later
about adding music, etc. To find our more about me, look here.
