Creating My First Book Trailer

Creating My First Book Trailer
Using I-movie
by Debra Orellana

Selecting a book to promote for a Book Trailer film was the 
best part in starting the project.

[Assignment for the following course: LIS 724-10 Media Services and Production, 2014: Professor Katie Kirsch; Dominican University Graduate
School of Library and Information Science, IL].

Considering the time limit of no more than 2 minutes, a book trailer should make a quick impression and pack enough excitement or interest in hope of

getting someone to read the book! I selected the story of Moominland Midwinter by Tove Jansson, Finland: published in 1957. 

Children and adults will escape to the world of Moomintrolls, creatures and beasts, all taking on roles and characters not unlike humans. A Moomin is a wonderful "being" that could draw the emotion out of any age through adventure. Jansson's ability to create sophisticated characters yet maintain some of their undomesticated attributes is great.

After making my book selection, I labeled some digital folders: images (a folder for collecting any visual that might be useable), book trailer images (a folder for the final selection of images to use in the trailer), audio folder (background music, narration aiffs.) and a text folder. I began my search online for Moomin-related facts and images, and luckily came across an audio clip at www.soundcloud.com of Hugh Dennis reading a page of the story. Because this assignment is for non-commercial use, I ripped a snippet of the narration to incorporate in the trailer. I was also very lucky in finding images that pertained to that portion of the story being read! Having enough materials to get my project started, I opened a new project file in i-movie for mac. Using I-Movie is somewhat easy in that it allows a drag-and-drop environment for image and audio files, making it less cumbersome in organizing the movie progression or montage.

I wanted to begin the trailer with a pop of color and show Moomintroll the protagonist of all tales Moomin, but I also wanted to include quick, brief facts about the book in general. Because it would be a fast short, legibility was very important to keep in mind when designing the text panels. To create the textual layouts for the "facts" portions of the trailer, I used Mac Pages since this would provide a greater selection of fonts and is much easier to work with. Once a text layout was completed, I used the program Grab to select the portion of the Pages layout to use in the I-Movie, then saved the file in my text folder.

After bringing in a few images in I-Movie to begin the trailer, I soon dropped in the background music. I chose the Japanese bubblegum band, Crayon Pop because of its energetic beat, fun, young and contemporary. The images were synced (somewhat) to the underlying beats by nudging and changing the image lengths and tweaking the fade-ins and outs. I was able to drop in bits of the narration audio tracks read by Hugh Dennis in order to add another element to the "book trailer experience". My finished Moominland Midwinter book trailer is a little under two minutes in length, and is ready to save to file. 

"I hope you enjoy meeting the Moomintrolls!"