Book trailer for Fairy Doctor Falls in Love. Tada!
I’ve also put it on my youtube channel, which you can find here.
How I made a book trailer
Making a book trailer seemed impossible at first.
I couldn’t figure out how to do this. How do you make a video about a book? I researched Light Works, and Open Shot. Both of these are professional video editing programs, so if you know what you’re doing then they’re great. I even got busy with 3D art and animation with Blender – only to discover cry as it crashed several times during my tutorial. (Probably because my computer is 4 years old and has the processing power of a caterpillar.) None of these options gave me a simple design. (But I found them all fascinating. My new hobby? you guessed it: video-editing and 3D design.)
I dug deeper. I checked out various on-line options, like Powtoon, Vimeo, Biteable, Animaker, and Animoto. So many choices. Where do I begin? Which one will give me a trailer for my book without costing gobs of money and time.
Well, I started at the top of my list with Powtoon.
Do I recommend using Powtoon?
Yes. It worked pretty well for me.
They offer a free basic version, and include a 3 day trial for their Pro features so you can to test it out. They also provide images and videos, but more importantly they have templates and you can animate everything with their simple options! A monthly subscription costs $19.
I followed their basic tutorial, and then I checked out their video templates for something that would work for my project. Eventually I started experimenting. Prior to finding a video editing program / website, I had collected a few things.
- A basic script
- music
That’s all.
The script was a mess frankly, but I’m not good at outlining when I write a book, so of course my script was messy, scribbled on a piece of paper. I had three ideas for this trailer. 1) Mystery of the Bride 2)Lillia and the Fairy Harassment 3)Wanted ‘One Fairy Doctor’. I tried the 2nd option – basically making a powerpoint storyboard and wasn’t impressed by it.
I settled on option 1 – the Mystery of the Bride.
Did I use a Storyboard?
No. I made my video completely by trial and error and experimenting. I was learning on the fly, but I it was satisfying to me to see how it looked and that I was making progress.
The nice thing about Powtoon is they don’t overwhelm you right away. They encourage you. The loading icon shows ‘Loading Awesomeness’
7 key features of Powtoons
1) The menu on the right is a good guide. Per their guidelines: start with the top and work your way down.
- Choose your Look
- Background
- Text
- Characters
- Props
- Shapes
- Sound
- Media
I’m an animation fan, so I picked the ‘white board’ look, rather than entirely realistic. Next for the background. I wanted something bright and tropical for the background, and found the swimming pool. It’s not ideal, but its bright and playful. There is a swimming pool in chapter 3. I kept wanting to adjust the background, throughout my editing process.
The first panel I edited was the last one, which has the Title of the book. I borrowed the animation of the title from a template, then added a heart, and the little pink explosion.
None of the characters in their stock art worked for my story – too generic, and not diverse enough.
2) The Timeline
You use the timeline to adjust when something happens in your clip. For instance, if I wanted the book to fly in at the same time the explosion begins. You can adjust effects, such as: appearing from the Right, Left, Up, Down, Pop, Fade, Bounce. Words can roll in, appear word by word, be typed in one letter at a time.
3) The Slides
This shows how many slides or panels or video clips you have. You can change the transition between panels, add slides, duplicate slides.
4) Play buttons
The smaller gray play button lets you play just the panel you’re working on. The larger blue one plays the video from the Gray Triangle. Remember to slide this triangle to the beginning if you want to sample your entire video.
5) The Sound menu!
I lost the sound menu after it first appear and then couldn’t find it, but it’s right there with the button that looks like a volume control. Add your music or use one of their tunes. After I added the music I made sure my panels and effects were in-sync with the sound. Unfortunately, you can’t add sound effects. Only a music track an a voice-over track. You can’t control where the music or voice begins either. It plays through one panel or it plays through all.
6) SAVE your work
Don’t forget to save. The preview is a nice feature and then export when you’re done.
7) Help menu
Use this menu to pull up helpful hints. (There is also a help menu in the upper left corner. Confusing I know, but I found the one on the bottom more useful.)
What did you think of my first book trailer? Be on the look out for more of them. Maybe this is like a teaser trailer. Then I can make a longer full trailer. And perhaps a preview trailer for the next book.