How to Make a Low Budget Book Trailer Part 4: The Completed Project
The book trailer is completed for my Young Adult horror/supernatural Dagger & Brimstone: Town from Hell. The book will be published in April 2015 and available on Amazon. Since I shot all my own video and only purchased two audio files from iStockphoto, which were one credit each, the cost came in around $10.
The desert scenes were actually shot in the Nevada desert, although the ‘Winthrop’ and ‘Welcome to Nevada’ signs were added in Photoshop. The coyote howls were captured at a golf course, the wooden planks were at Bonnie Springs Ranch, and most of the other scenes were shot at home. View the video on YouTube.
Differences from the Original Layout
In the first part of the series, How to Make a Low Budget Book Trailer: Step by Step, I showed how I created a storyboard before shooting the video. Most of the ideas from the storyboard were shot as scenes in the final version; however, after having friends view the first version of the trailer, one scene that confused them was deleted. The handwritten notes from Racer and Arloe were replaced by boots and backpacks sitting next to a door. Also the scene with a door, which would have had Blue’s symbol emblazoned on it, was replaced by a treasure chest—possibly hiding a body—watch the trailer to find out.
Special or Not-so Special Effects
I created a burning symbol in Photoshop that glows within Racer’s tattoo on his bicep. The original tattoo wasn’t very good, so I worked on it to get a better version. The flaming symbol isn’t perfect, but I think it portrays what I was getting at. Leave a comment and let me know what you think. I’ve had mixed reviews on it so far. It gives me incentive to work on my Photoshop skills.
The Final Installment
Overall, I’m happy with the final trailer and the fact it is completed weeks before Dagger & Brimstone: Town from Hell is for sale on Amazon. Hopefully, it will stir up interest about what’s going on in Winthrop and what Sheriff Blue really is. As I bring this series in my blog to a close, I hope that any or all of it has helped inspire you to try making a trailer. Good luck with your endeavor!
How to Make a Low Budget Book Trailer Part 2: Laying Out the Scenes
This is the second part in my blog series How to Make a Low Budget Book Trailer. In this series, I will go over how I complete each step of my young adult, horror/supernatural book trailer for Dagger & Brimstone: Town from Hell. At this point, I shot some new video, searched through old video, and took pictures to begin to build the trailer in the film editing software I use, Movie Maker.
If You Don’t Have All the Needed Video
My roughly sketched out storyboard lays out how I envision the initial video. Some footage I decided to use, such as desert scenes, footsteps on squeaky floorboards, and a thunderstorm, was already in my library. After opening a new Movie Maker project, I added that footage first in the order it appears on the storyboard. I edited each section of video by cropping the length to six seconds and changing the brightness and tone, which is under the visual effects tab.
To fill in the gaps where I don’t have the right footage yet, I snapped pictures to use as placeholders. For instance, the opening scene will show a table with two handwritten notes, signed by my two main characters Racer and Arloe. I took a picture of two pieces of paper and added it to Movie Maker. The duration can be set on photos as well as videos, so I set the photo’s duration to six seconds. When I get the proper video, I’ll just replace the photo in Movie Maker. By using a placeholder, I can see how the scenes flow together and where I will add text.
The Second Step is Adding Music and Sound Effects
As soon as I get all the video and placeholders into Movie Maker, I will work on finding sounds or music to add to it. There are three ways I’ve acquired sound in the past:
- Using the natural background noise of the video
- Stripping audio from another video by using Audacity software
- Purchasing sounds/music from online suppliers which is generally cheaper than video
In my book trailer, The Troubled Souls of Goldie Rich: The Zombie Next Door, I used all three methods. The footsteps crunching leaves in the graveyard scene and the thunder occurring after the lighting is natural background noise. The wolf howling during the full moon and the doorbell ringing was stripped from different video I’d taken. All the music and the noise of the candle cracking were purchased.
I have already determined which background sounds I’m keeping and which need to be turned off for each section of video in the new trailer. By the next blog, I’ll have hopefully shot the video I’m lacking and gotten my sounds and music together.
Saving the Text and Special Effects for Last
Text can be added in Movie Maker with many options including font size, color, and duration on screen. The text will be lines I’ve chosen from the manuscript, which will introduce the characters and set up the story. Making sure the text is easy to see and on screen long enough to read takes a lot of testing.
The hardest part of the trailer will be adding special effects. I am not an expert at Photoshop, but I use it every so often. In The Zombie Next Door trailer, I used Photoshop to make the gravestone with the angel on top. I also used it to change the angel into the gargoyle and make the voodoo doll wink. All of it was done with photos and not video.
For this trailer, I’m going to create a tattoo on a picture of a bicep I took and make the tattoo’s outlines turn into dancing flames–hopefully. I also want to create a welcome sign for my fictional town, Winthrop. I will use a photo of a desert landscape and add the sign. I hope to have the “before and after” pictures for the next blog.
How to Make a Low Budget Book Trailer: Step by Step
In my other blog series, Creating a Low-budget Book Trailer: The First Steps, I went over the process I used to create my middle grade and young adult book trailers for under $40. This blog will go through the step-by-step process for my new book trailer from the original ideas to the final product and all the changes in between. Do not confuse low budget with easy. To create a decent book trailer that is one to two minutes long, you will have to invest a good deal of time. Are you ready?
Keep in Mind
I am not a professional videographer, and I do not put together book trailers for a living. I am not promoting any software or companies that sell audio or video. I am just an author on a really tight advertising budget, passing along tips to fellow authors. Even if you don’t find my book trailers as wonderful as I’d like you to, you may be able to pick up a useful tip or two to make an even more fabulous one of your own.
Although I have books published, the trailer I’m going to create will be for a manuscript that isn’t published. Why would I go through the trouble? The reason is simple: I want to be prepared. Hopefully, my agent/publisher will want to publish the book, and when/if I get the thumbs up, I can start promoting it to build interest.
Key Points of the Book Trailer
My manuscript, Dagger & Brimstone: Town from Hell, is a young adult, horror, supernatural adventure. It’s suspenseful and has some gross scenes. I want those points to come across in my trailer without giving too much away. The quick synopsis is: two 17-year-olds are very much and love and decide to run away just for the summer to escape their meddling parents. The juvenile delinquent Racer and college-bound Arloe are as opposite as their families. They go off the grid exactly like they planned to a remote town and wind up in a nightmare. Of course, their parents can’t help them because they have no clue where the teens went.
Show and Tell
I picked out a few scenes from the manuscript that would set up the story and let the viewer know the teens didn’t arrive at a pleasant place. On a sheet of paper divided into 10 sections, I roughly (as in Pictionary drawings) sketched my ideas for the scenes. I am very visual, so this helps me a lot. It took a few days to decide what to use; I didn’t zoom through it in five minutes.
I copy and pasted lines from the manuscript into another document. I chose short lines that I thought were interesting, informative, and would introduce my main characters, Racer, Arloe, and Sheriff Blue. Again, it was a time-consuming process. For the next blog, I’ll match the scenes with the lines. Examples of lines:
• Our parents will never find us—I made sure of that.
• Everyone we’d met in Winthrop had a name from the book of nursery rhymes. It was all too weird, and I couldn’t get out of town fast enough.
• “Jack hid bodies!”
I stared at the frozen face of a middle-aged man. His blue lips had frozen squashed against the clear plastic that encased his body, and his pale, lifeless eyes had partially rolled back in their sockets. “I think Jack is a body.”
• “We’ll never get out of here. Things are roaming all over this place.”
“What kind of thing is Blue exactly?”
Just like a manuscript, this is a first draft, but it gives me a starting point. From here, I’ll work on tightening the sentences, finding music and sounds to enhance the scenes and figure out where I’ll shoot or acquire my envisioned video and stills. I recently found this blog by author Kate Bloomfield that also has helpful tips, and I think her trailer is well done.
Check back on my blog to see how the trailer for Dagger & Brimstone: Town from Hell is coming along.
Making Your Low Budget Book Trailer Interesting
A book trailer you make on a small budget can be as captivating and entertaining as one that costs thousands to make, but you have to be ready to invest a good deal of time on effort on it. When I made the book trailer for my middle grade book, Pirates Off the Deep End, I had never used video editing software before and was pretty clueless about how to begin. Finding blogs such as this one can be invaluable resources. In fact, one blog I found handy is The BookBaby Blog.
For my second book trailer, The Zombie Next Door, I had a handle on what I was doing and could get a little more creative. I wanted to create a scene from the book that involved a nightmare the main character Goldie Rich had. She wandered in a creepy graveyard at night, of course, and admired the beautiful angel statue, which proceeded to turn into a hideous gargoyle right before her eyes.
Fallen Angel
Although video and .jpgs can be incorporated into your trailer, if you have any ability with photo editing software such as Photoshop, you can produce some ‘book trailer magic’ as well. I am not a Photoshop expert by any means, but after taking a class and playing around with it, I can generally get projects put together the way I envision them. Above left is a 5-inch angel statue I photographed at a fountain store. I turned her into a headstone using Photoshop to use as the first photo in a series that changes the angel into the gargoyle show below.
Haunting Goldie’s Nightmares
The gargoyle above was a two-foot high statue at the same fountain store. Since I only photographed the statues and didn’t purchase them, it didn’t cost me anything. Using Photoshop, I converted the angel into the gargoyle with two photos that underwent a combined 18 stages. In each stage, the main subject was slightly skewed, shrunken, and re-colored. For the final pictures, I flipped the gargoyle vertically and colored the eyes red.
I was happy with the results, and my SCBWI critique group that watched the video thought it was a nice touch. I also used the technique to make the voodoo doll in the Zombie video wink. If you’re thinking…zombies, graveyards, voodoo doll…pretty cool, check out my book The Troubled Souls of Goldie Rich: The Zombie Next Door on my Amazon Author’s Page. And good luck with your trailer.
Creating a Low-Budget Book Trailer: Audio and Music
Making my Pirates Off the Deep End book trailer was a multi-step process. If you haven’t followed my blog, I’ll do a quick summary. First, I literally sketched out my scenes with pictures no better than you’d draw for Pictionary. That helped me organize my thoughts to know what video I needed. I also matched the scenes with quotes from my book. Next, I shot 10 to 20 seconds of different video to try to match the ideas I had on paper.
Before I put the video clips together, I searched for music and sounds to enhance the trailer. Of course, when you take video, it has audio. However, the audio may not be clear and may be saturated with background noise. On the bright side, audio isn’t as expensive to purchase as video. I also used free software, Audacity, to pull audio out of video such as in my Zombie Next Door trailer. The ringing doorbell was removed from one video and added to the ‘tortilla chip scene.’ I am not promoting Audacity software, just telling you what I used.
Did I Spend Any Money?
Yes, I did. My Pirates Off the Deep End book trailer cost $32 to make plus my time. The hourglass cost me $12 plus shipping. I also bought $20 of sounds from iStockPhoto. You MUST give credit for any audio or video you purchase in your trailer. If you look at the credits at the end of my trailer, you will see the iStockPhoto purchases. I’m not sure about other companies, but once you download through iStockPhoto, you can use it in multiple trailers as long as you give credit. Their website goes over all the rules and regulations. Once again, I’m not promoting them, just telling you where I purchased my audio.
For my second trailer, The Zombie Next Door, I used the same sounds I’d purchased already and recorded some of my own such as the wolf howling. This goes back to my advice of keeping the camcorder handy. I actually got lucky with the howling wolf. I visited a wolf sanctuary, and an emergency vehicle passed by sirens blaring. That will set the wolves off every time. I used Audacity software to extract the howling from the video so that it could be added to the creepy moon scene.
Whatever Works Part II
Audio makes a huge difference toward the quality of the trailer. I actually purchased the pirate laugh and the candle noise at the end of my video. My camcorder didn’t pick up any candle crackle, so I added the sound for effect. Although the movie editing software cuts out a lot of background noise, music or sounds cover any that is left. In Turbo’s scene, the music covered over the noise of the vacuum cleaner. Turbo doesn’t attack on command, but he does attack the vacuum every single time it’s on. I needed him in attack mode, so I fired up the vacuum. Whatever works.
I have to admit, I learned a lot making the trailers, and I had a great time doing it. I’m still learning. Of course, I like doing creative, artsy stuff. It also helps when family and friends get involved. When I filmed The Zombie Next Door, my neighbor let me film the curtain scene in his house since I don’t have curtains, and my brother-in-law videotaped some creepy graveyards for me since they have a huge selection where he’s from. Just be sure to give whoever helps proper credit in your credits at the end of the trailer. In my next blog, I’ll tell you how I put the video, audio, and .jpgs together with Movie Maker software.
Creating a Low-Budget Book Trailer: Getting the Footage You Need
With my rough sketch of my book trailer in hand, I grabbed my camera, camcorder, and tripod and got down to business. Let me just make it clear that I do not own professional video equipment. My digital camera is a nice point-and-shoot Sony Cyber-shot, and my digital camcorder is a Sony Handy-cam. I borrowed the tripod from my daughter, who is an aspiring photographer. I used Movie Maker software, which I’d never used before making the book trailer. It’s easy to figure out and worked well for my needs. As with any software, you get faster with it and learn tricks as you go. I am not selling any product, just telling you what I used.
My first challenge—my book, Pirates Off the Deep End, is set mainly on a boat in the ocean or in South American ports. I live in a desert. It could have been a potential problem, but I made it work.
Making Do
I could have driven four hours to the ocean, but I didn’t. I would have loved to, but a beach trip costs time and money. I went down to the local lake and videotaped scenes of different boats and the marina. A tripod helped tremendously, especially after a cup of coffee, to get non-shaky video. I zoomed in and out, filmed from different directions, and took some random fish video. You never know. I did have to drive 30 minutes, so I made the most of my time.
The rest of my trailer except for the sunset and full moon is shot inside my home. By showing a boat in the first scene, it gives the illusion (or is meant to) that the rest of the action takes place on a boat.
Video Tips from an Amateur
I kept the video under 20 seconds. Short videos download faster, are easier to crop, and take up less space on your computer. If you’re only using 10 seconds of video per scene, shooting 20 seconds should give you plenty to work with. The tripod is really worthwhile. To acquire one cheaply, borrow one, buy one used online or seek out one at a garage sale. Get one if you plan on making more than one trailer. Try to limit the background noise, if possible.
Keep Your Camcorder Handy
Buying footage can be expensive, so I learned fast to shoot random video and save it. The old proverb about ‘saving for a rainy day’ really works when you live in the desert and only see rain every three months. After a huge summer rain, I ran for my camcorder. Clouds make for a beautiful sunset and great moon shots. I got lucky with the sunset video and creepy full moon. I actually used the moon in my other book trailer, too. Recycling footage and audio saves money.
Whatever Works Part I
The $12 hourglass I purchased does not glow. It only shifts sand back and forth. I needed a glowing hourglass because that’s what in my story. It’s actually a huge part of the story. To get the hourglass to glow green, I set the camcorder on the tripod and turned it on. I held a green translucent paper over a flashlight and pointed it at the hourglass. By the way, the candle and hourglass were sitting on a hamper in my hallway—far from any boat. Yep, whatever works.
If you’re still following along, go shoot some video and make sure to have a clear .jpg of your book cover. Also, you may find some free video you can use at Vidsplay. I used on of their beach videos as my opening scene for my Zombie Next Door book trailer. Don’t forget to write down the information to give them credit if you do use their video. In my next blog, I’ll cover audio.
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