Author Christine Lindsay has had first hand experience in creating trailers for novels. (See last week's post for part one of creating book trailers and using them for marketing purposes.)
Today, Christine continues to share how she went about creating book trailers for her novels, Shadowed in Silk and Captured by Moonlight.
Christine - Use your imagination. But don’t be too quick to say your trailer is finished. Have your friends look at it. Ask them if the text is going by too fast? Are any of the little flourishes making it hard to read?
This happened when I added a little sunburst to when Laine in Captured by Moonlight says, “But never
again.”
It creates a second of confusion because the burst of light obscures the
first word. But the sentence is short, and that little burst of light is resonant
of the defiant emotion in the character. So I kept it that way. But in the end
made the size of the text bigger.
By using different lengths for scenes you can slow down where you want
the watcher to stay longer, such as in Shadowed
in Silk where the reader is introduced to those Indian arches and the word
India comes out at them in glorious color.
In Captured by Moonlight, I
used the same arches, but adjusted the color to the bluish tone. My viewer
remains there a little longer to understand the tension of the story as it
comes out at them.
In the back-to-back scenes with Laine in Captured by Moonlight, where the script says Adam crushed her
heart, I shortened the seconds for that text and video to 3 seconds, so that
the quickness produces an almost toss of the head with that burst of light,
when the character says, “But never again.”
In my opinion, a reader doesn’t need to read every single word, but
that’s me. When I see an ad for a movie, I’m only getting a ‘feel’ for the
movie.
That’s the part of me that as a painter I’m not afraid to experiment.
Same thing with my trailers, they aren’t someone else’s artistic impression of
my book, they are my artistic impression
of my book.
In both my trailers I’ve made mistakes that I’ve learned from.
In Shadowed in Silk, I played
around too much with different types of color tones. I started out in somber
and then changed to a rush of color when my main character gets to India.
That’s all fine, but the black and white photo of the soldiers in the WW1
trenches is just too different in tone and texture. It jars.
I did better at keeping the tone of the pictures in Captured by Moonlight. If you’ll notice there is a bluish tone to all
photos—a coolness and a softness to the texture.
But in the first shot of Laine in her nurse’s uniform there is a hair
out of place from poor cropping of the photo, and the color tone isn’t quite
right.
Still all in all, it’s not too bad, and it cost me less than $100 to
produce.
It creates an emotional response, and that is worth it to me.
(See Christine's book trailers: Book Trailer for Shadowed in Silk, Book Trailer for Captured by Moonlight)
(See Christine's book trailers: Book Trailer for Shadowed in Silk, Book Trailer for Captured by Moonlight)
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Christine Lindsay writes historical novels with strong love stories. She’s proud of her Irish roots. Her great grandfather and grandfather worked as riveters in the Belfast shipyard, and one of the ships they helped build was the Titanic. Another ancestor served in the British Cavalry in India, seeding Christine’s long-time fascination with the British Raj and became the stimulus for her series Twilight of the British Raj, and her debut novel, SHADOWED IN SILK. Her current release CAPTURED BY MOONLIGHT is Book 2 of that series.
The Pacific coast of Canada, about 200 miles north of Seattle, is Christine’s home. She and her husband enjoy the empty nest, but look forward to all the noise when the kids and grandkids come home. And like a lot of writers, her cat is her chief editor.
