on book trailers . . . .

painted leaves

So when I was making the book trailer for Painted Boots, I went through about 7000 ideas before I settled on what you see on YouTube.  I had a grandiose vision.  It was my first book trailer (and yes, so far my only, though not for lack of ideas.  Just for lack of time.)  I love stop-motion animation and I was going to draw out the whole trailer, photographing it one little ink stroke at a time, then put it all together.  iMovie crashed when I tried loading all those pics.

Then I had another brainstorm: painted leaves!  I painted a bunch of leaves and moved them around, painstaking eighth-inch by eighth-inch, so that they would seem to blow in the wind, revealing words and stuff about Painted Boots.  Again, it was stop-motion animation and again, I crashed iMovie with all the pics.

I went up to my local Apple store to complain.  What was I doing wrong?  The guys were nice, but they didn't have much iMovie experience themselves, and they weren't much help except to say, "uh, your file size on those pictures is huge'.  I changed to low-resolution, and found I could load about three hundred images before my iMovie crashed.  So one fine sunny morning, I set up my camera on a tripod in the woods and began carving into a big old aspen tree.  Not all of the pics would load into iMovie, which was a drag, because beyond the heart I had carved an endless amount of flourish and it was very cool.

But I had enough for my first book trailer ever.  It no longer had to be perfect.  It just had to communicate.  I think it worked out fine, and lately, I've been feeling the inspiration to make a trailer for BEING.  But in the meantime, if you are wondering how it all turned out for Painted Boots, you can view it on my Goodreads page.  Or just click here.

Enjoy!