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Most of you already know I've been holding a contest to produce a book trailer for my novel, Big Slick. Well, the votes have been counted. I am pleased to announce the winners of the book trailer contest are the good folks over at Boys Blogging Books!

Here is their entry:



Simply fantastic. Original music and everything! I want to thank everyone for their effort and to let Jennifer, a YA librarian from Illinois, know that she has won for posting about the contest! I'll be in touch with both winners by email to talk about prizes!

The day has finally arrived—my book trailer is finished and ready to be viewed! I have posted it on my website at www.chrysalispress.com in the Media Room under “Book Trailer.” It is also posted on Reader Views Kids website at http://readerviewskids.com/reviews_previews.html. I will also post it on youtube.com (you will have to search for it under “Laura and the Leprechauns”) and on my myspace page which is myspace.com/ambertkingston. The part I played in its creative process was lots of fun but it was so difficult to wait for the more difficult and exciting parts like animation and sound to be completed. Now I see that my patience paid off. I am very happy with it and I hope that you will be too. Happy viewing!

Sincerely,

Amber

Who started all this talk about book trailers, anyway? It was illustrator Layne Johnson, who has several such videos on YouTube. His Farmer George preview is sure to inspire viewers to read this beautiful book, written by Peggy Thomas.


Some years ago, a children’s radio station in Orlando made an audio version of one of my older books, The Dragon Halloween Party. There was bouncy music, professional voice overs, and high-pitched exclamations by the dragons such as “Ouch!” and “Oooooo!” It was delightful, but there was no chance of doing anything like that myself. Or maybe there is…



Several PBAA members have been inspired to make trailers in the last few days. Hopefully some of them will post their masterpieces, too. A few tips from my newbie experience:

On a Mac, iMovie works well to create a mini-movie. I had to download v.3.0.3 to get the “Ken Burns Effect,” where you can pan and zoom across still images. It can be a little temperamental, so save your work often. My system is so old (OS 10.2.8), I couldn’t use the newer versions—the latest version is iMovie 08.

You need iPhoto to create an “album” of the illustrations images which then can be brought into iMovie. They have to be in an album or iMovie can’t see them. I downsampled the illos first in Photoshop to make them about the size of a photo (4" X 6") because iMovie seemed to reject an image that was too large. It probably says in the Help what the maximum image size is, may have to read it sometime…

The voice-overs were recorded using my digital camera, which can be set to record in Audio mode while taking a photo. (My computer does not have a built-in microphone.) Each bit of sound was tweaked in Audacity, a free download. You can make the sound track faster, higher, lower, and do various other distortions. Max Headroom, anyone?

I didn’t use any music in my preview, but would like to try it in the future. My brother has Garage Band, and it should be easy to put together a simple bouncy tune to layer underneath.

One note: if you plan to embed the YouTube viewer, be sure to make a “custom” viewer. After playing your video, the standard one puts random videos from YouTube as little icons to click on and play, which I didn’t want. I think there’s a Blogger viewer, but didn’t take the time to figure that out.

It’s ton of fun, although it did take a fairly long time to make only one minute of video. Now that I have an idea of the process, the next one should go faster. Why not make a preview video of your book today?

Loreen

More and more book trailers are popping up in the children's lit world - or maybe I'm just noticing them more since I just finished one of my own.

Here's a new one from author Mitali Perkins: