I love book trailers… but I hate videos, or at least how easily they can end up padding themselves out without a real reason for the extra minutes. So that puts me in a fun place now that the time’s here to get my own trailer for The High Road.
Training for the Trailer
You don’t have to be a writer to see the logic that makes a trailer. Of course that’s what a trailer is: taking the arcs and the sizzle of storytelling, and arranging them so someone can “know” the story in a minute. It’s distilling the tale.
And I do love that challenge. After all, Shadowed has completely different back-cover and inside-cover copy (“Paul lives in hiding… the one person who knows…” vs “Open your mind… take another look”) simply because I got into writing both. So how many plot points does a trailer need? How many words, to leave how many pauses in a timeframe?
But then making the video itself? No way I’d do that.
I’d either lose weeks learning the software and hating the result, or lose weeks learning the process and love it too much to ever finish. I always knew I’d start with the script and then work with an expert to get the final result. So instead I studied trailers like Joanna Penn’s advice at http://www.thecreativepenn.com/2015/03/02/book-trailers/ and http://www.thecreativepenn.com/2011/01/07/how-to-create-a-book-trailer/ and looked at what could work. Then I went shopping.
The result?
So what do you think? Do the skyline and cloud images, and how they alternate with fire and destruction, make the point about the joy of flying and the dangers Mark and Angie are in? Should more of the cityscapes have been at night (when most of the flying happens), or does the light/dark contrast work better on a visual level?
I think there’s a lot to like here.
Especially, I like that it keeps to 45 seconds instead of the two to three minutes of so many trailers—both book and movie. It always bugs me when a video fills up time with less inspired content, figuring that just making it visual means every second is earning its keep. (A lesson we writers are relearning with every line we write!) And a trailer isn’t like the recorded clips I’ve put up, for a fan who wants to follow a page of my writing with their own ears. No, it ought to hook, and re-hook, the viewer with every line.
Ahead on the Trailer Track
If you take another look at Joanna’s above, and compare, I think we did okay for our first time out. Similar lengths, and a lot of similar arcs and techniques.
Or there are longer, more detailed trailers out there, like for Hugh Howey’s classic Wool at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-ardca2IAg
Of course that one takes the leap to using custom-built images for every shot, from the View Outside to the computer readings… enough to make me pound my fists and wish for a bigger budget. But there’s no question the words and the images follow a story, the distillation of what we need to know about Jules’s world.
(On the other hand, Hugh himself has some thoughts about the art of trailer-making, and what might be shaking it up soon: http://www.hughhowey.com/this-is-only-the-beginning/ )
Or there’s the all-out cinematic approach, like some of Jim Butcher’s fans did for Skin Game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8ZUvrIQWuY
That’s a full three minutes with actors, staged moments, and everything else it needs to convince us this Dresden Files book is a film out there (well, why isn’t it?). Shifting storms, characters set up to show their conflicts with each other in a few shouted words… or a burning subtitle to introduce their roles in the heist Harry gets trapped in.
(If anything, the last glimpses on the trailer might be too fan-centric. You need to know the other books to see why Michael Carpenter defending his home is such a big deal, and you need to have already read this one to appreciate how that moment’s not part of the caper but the dread aftermath. Still, how could they not have referenced a scene that got as wild as that one, even if they stayed clear of the real spoilers…)
It all gives me a lot to mull over. I think I’m getting the hang of picking the words to tell a story in trailer form… the next step could be to go further in matching images to the pieces.
- Should there be more moments, more pieces of words and story elements along the way?
- Or less? (For more oomph for each.)
- Onscreen text instead of voiceovers? Or a mix, like some of Joanna’s?
And then there’s the other trailer. The one Ilona Andrews made to make fun of trailers themselves: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMxG1ayUAOw
“Cheesy,” it calls them. There’s truth to that; book trailers try so hard to say so much quickly, they do have a bit of absurdity to them. Then again, even a parody like this has to know what it’s spoofing… and a good skewer does help me remember what matters. Like memorable moments that (should) string together to imply the story, good visuals or phrases that hook in their own right…
Not quite so many cute kittens, though. Unless I could get a shot of a kitten touching someone and possessing him.
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