Finished making the trailer and finding the sound effects for the music today. I decided to go with that “old film” feel as much as I could. Initially, I was going to do a black-and-white silent movie with scrollwork on black panels as the promotional text. It ended up being too hard to see the fire in the clips I had used for the trailer, so I added a touch of color and aged the individual panels with a few special effects.
The fun part about creating this trailer, is that in my head I had all of these really sophisticated ideas for other things I wanted to do with it, but I did what I could with the technology that I had on hand. In many ways, it’s a lot like putting the pieces of a puzzle together. Employing a variety of special effects through Windows Movie Maker, a superb image editor called Paint.net and royalty-free stockart and clips from a handful of sites, I was able to pull something together that I’m really pleased with. The trailer took longer to create than I had expected it to, because I had to use the mighty Google to do some wacky file conversion in order to make several of the clips work.
The trailer is dark and atmospheric, there’s no doubt about that, but now my portion of this task is over. I still need to “get” the trailer over to the composer, but Google failed me. *sob* Their max limit to send files is 25MB. I was at 22MB and it still didn’t take. So now, I’ll probably have to use Dropbox’s shared file feature or something to that effect. Ugh.
Anyway, I’m really glad that the trailer is done and (hopefully) I did a good job explaining the extra goodies in the e-book. Even though I typically find the music after I’m done with the trailer, I’ve never had this sort of an experience where the work needs to be wholly complete before I send it off. Usually, I have to tweak and poke and prod until the images match the beats of the music. Like the previous trailer, it clocks in around 1:30, which is perfect for my attention span.
In other news, I’m still looking for a layout artist that’s affordable; hoping to get some quotes and then utilize something like Kickstarter to raise funds. Several of you have asked for a print copy and, admittedly, I’m thinking about a sequel, too.
For now? I wait for the music. In the meantime, I have to get cracking. After all, time is a-wastin’.
