I created a book trailer for FOUR EMPERORS, a fun
supernatural mystery-slash-gay romance that I wrote and published with my company,
Luft Books, under the pen name Evan Allen. This is my first-ever book trailer;
I made it on a budget of, ahem, zero dollars, excluding whatever I spent on nifty
swag to send to four of my friends to thank them for lending their vocal
talents to the soundtrack. In case anybody is interested in making a trailer
this way, here’s an overview of my
process, mistakes and all:
In creating this, I used four software programs: Adobe Photoshop,
PowerPoint, Movie Maker, and Audacity. If you have Microsoft Office, you already
have PowerPoint. Audacity is completely free (and awesome); Movie Maker is included with Windows Essentials,
so if you have Windows, you either have it already, or can download it for
free. Photoshop is most definitely not
free, but if you don’t have it, there are a bunch of free alternatives.
I knew from the start that I wouldn’t need to shoot any
footage. I envisioned this as just a series of text-heavy images sliding
together to tell a story. In some ways this made it much easier, and in some
ways it made it pretty elaborate and time-consuming. First up, I put together a detailed shooting
script, with separate columns for the on-screen text, the visuals, and the
audio. Like so:
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| The shooting script was crucial for keeping myself organized throughout the process. |
Next, I created all my stills in Photoshop. For a video that
clocks in at under two minutes, I made over eighty stills. This took a while,
but many of the stills were just slight variations on other stills, so it wasn’t
nearly as onerous as it sounds. I built all my images at 1024 x 768 pixels (4:3
aspect ratio), because that’s a nice, common display resolution; next time I do
this, I’ll probably build them at 1280 x 720 instead, because as it turns out, YouTube
uses a 16:9 aspect ratio. Which is something I might’ve checked before plunging
in! As it is, the trailer shows up on YouTube with black bars at the sides to
make it fit the screen. I can live with that.
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| This is what it looks like on YouTube. The black bars at the sides appear because my aspect ratio isn’t a match for YouTube’s. |
I did the Chinese brushwork myself, by the way. Painted it,
photographed it, Photoshopped it. I had three years of Japanese language
lessons in high school, which included a yearly unit on calligraphy; I’m delighted
to find this knowledge finally came in handy in everyday life.
Once I had all my stills, which I saved in .jpg format, I
added each still, in the correct order, as a slide in a single PowerPoint
presentation.
After that was done, the trickiest part of this stage was
timing the transitions between each slide. PowerPoint offers a handful of
snazzy transition effects (checkerboards! ripples! glitter!), but for my
purposes, I used straight cuts (no transition effects, in other words)
interspersed with a few strategic fades. I used a stopwatch to time myself reading the
narration and dialogue aloud, which gave me a good ballpark figure for how long
to stay on each slide, but there was a lot of trial-and-error involved. From PowerPoint’s Transitions menu, I input
the correct time to linger on each slide, bearing in mind that any time I’d use
a fade, the transition would add an extra 0.70 seconds, which I’d have to
factor into the final calculations.
For example, the slide shown below appears on the screen while someone
delivers this bit of dialogue: “You were strangling to death on your own blood
from a sword to the throat.” I wanted it to be wedged tightly, almost to the
point of overlapping, between two other snippets of dialogue (“It was hard to
shake the feeling that my personal life was getting sloppy” and “I’m going to
kiss you now, okay?”). I timed myself briskly reading that line in just under
three seconds. There’s a fade, which adds 0.70 seconds. So I set the time to linger on the slide
before advancing at 00:02.20, with the duration of the transition automatically
set at 0.70 seconds, which meant the total time on this slide would be 00:02:90
seconds, which seemed just about right.
When I was all done with timing it, I had a slideshow
presentation that looked pretty much exactly how I wanted my trailer to look,
minus the audio track and the end credits. Under “Save & Send” in
PowerPoint, I clicked “Create a Video”, which saved it as a .wmv video file.
Next up: The audio
track! I sent out feelers to a group of friends with experience doing this sort
of thing, asking if they’d be interested in some simple voice-over work. All
four of my voice actors submitted their audio remotely—Heather lives in Los
Angeles, Matt lives in Kansas City, Shawn lives in Spokane, and Morgan Dodge
lives in the Bay Area. Either I’d have them record their lines separately and
email or Dropbox me the .mp3 or .wav files, or I’d just have them call a Google Voice number set up for this purpose and read off their lines into a
voicemail message, which I’d then download as an .mp3. Google Voice ended up
being more erratic in quality—as is the nature of phone audio, sometimes the
quality was pristine, and sometimes it was muddy—but it was certainly the easiest
option.
Props to my voice actors: Across the board, they were awesome.
Background music: I made this on no budget, right? I perused
YouTube’s royalty-free audio library options until I found a suitable track
(the track I used required no attribution, but the composer deserves a
shout-out anyway for being sporting enough to put his/her music online for anybody’s free use: it
was “Mob Battle” by Silent Partner). I also used one sound effect, the thunder
clap at the beginning, from YouTube’s sound effects library.
I assembled the audio in Audacity, which I’d never used
before. Great program. Robust, with lots of bells and whistles, and as I
mentioned before… totally free. I wrote
down all the time codes for each bit of dialogue from my .wmv file. Then I slapped
each audio element—the background music, the thunder clap, each line of
dialogue—on a separate track within a single Audacity file, then moved each element into
the proper location based on the .wmv time codes. Once again, there was a lot
of trial and error involved here. I faded the background music in and out as
appropriate around the dialogue, adjusted volume levels, and called it good.
When I was happy with it, I exported the complete audio track as a .wav file.
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| This is a glimpse of part of my messy, messy Audacity file. I suspect the sight of this would make seasoned audio professionals cringe at the half-assedness of my work. |
When I had the complete audio track as a .wav file, and the
complete video track (minus credits) as a .wmv file, I used Movie Maker to
combine the two. Movie Maker is cheerful and user-friendly (it defaults to
saving your video files as “My Movie”, if that gives you some idea of the friendliness) and, if you
have Windows, free. I like all these things about Movie Maker. It is not,
however, especially robust. This is why I mixed the audio in a separate program
instead of trying to mix it all together in Movie Maker, which is possible, but not all that practical.
Movie Maker is designed to handle only two audio tracks at once (narration and
background music), whereas with Audacity, I had nineteen tracks going at the
same time. On the plus side, adding credits in Movie Maker, which was my final
step in this whole process, was a breeze.
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| I kept Movie Maker's default title of "My Movie", just because there's something endearingly idiotic about that. |
When that was all done, all that was left was to save the
finalized video as an .mp4 and upload it to YouTube.
Fun process. I made a lot of mistakes along the way, but as
a first effort, it was a great learning experience. I’m looking forward to
doing this for all of my other books as well.
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