MM: Book Trailer Tutorial

Hello everyone! Today I’ll be talking about book trailers; specifically, how to make them. They’re great promotional tools, fun to create, and relatively simple. I’ll take you through my process step by step. I know there are different ways of creating them and different programs to us, but I’ll stick with what I know and what is working for me. If you have any questions afterward, just ask!

Step One: First, you must find the graphics you want to use in your trailer. There are different ways of doing this; you can google PUBLIC DOMAIN PHOTOS, FREE IMAGES, STOCK IMAGES. Try istockphoto.com, freestockimages.net, stock.xchng (http://www.sxc.hu/), jupiterimages.com, dreamstime.com. Google is your friend. Just remember that if you’re not paying for it, the photo has to be royalty free, or you have to have permission. I have found some really fantastic photos at DeviantArt. Of course, I get permission from each artist before using anything and credit them at the end of the video.

Step Two: Find your music. Again, you must find royalty free music. I use Kevin MacLeod. I love him.

Step Three: Put royalty free images and music into an easily accessible folder on your computer.

Step Four: On your computer, go to START, ALL PROGRAMS, ACCESSORIES, then click WINDOWS MOVIE MAKER.

Step Five: Under CAPTURE VIDEO in the sidebar, Click on IMPORT PICTURES, find the folder in which you stored the downloaded images, and select the pictures you want. To select more than one picture, hold CTRL while selecting pictures.

IMPORTANT: Go to FILE, and click on SAVE PROJECT AS and name your video. After you’ve done that, click on SAVE often.

Step Six: if STORYBOARD is already selected at the bottom, click and drag your photos, one by one, into the large white slots at the bottom. You can rearrange the order of the pictures later if you need to. If STORYBOARD view is not selected, simply click on SHOW TIMELINE and it will switch to STORYBOARD. Later, you will need to change to SHOW TIMELINE.

Step Seven: Under EDIT MOVIE in the sidebar, select VIEW VIDEO EFFECTS. Choose the effect you want, such as EASE OUT, and drag it down into the little square with the faded out star on your photo on the STORYBOARD. Choose an effect for each photo, and repeat process. If you want to combine effects on a photo, such as EASE OUT and FILM AGE, OLD, simply drag in the EASE OUT first, then the FILM AGE, OLD. You can do this with as many as you’d like. Also, if you select EASE IN and drag this effect to the same photo several times, the EASE IN will be faster and deeper. I particularly like and use EASE IN or OUT in combination with FILM AGE, OLD, because it makes the pictures come alive.

Step Eight: Under CAPTURE VIDEO, click on IMPORT AUDIO OR MUSIC. Select your music.

Step Nine: Click on SHOW TIMELINE at the bottom. Drag your music to the third line under the filmstrip, where it says DRAG AN AUDIO CLIP HERE TO ADD TO YOUR MOVIE when you mouse over. Grab the music once it’s on your timeline and drag it to the beginning image, if it’s not already there. Then you can grasp the end of the music and drag it to where it stretches longer than your last picture. You’ll have to add ending credits; once that’s finished, you can stretch the music to be a little longer than the ending credits. Actually, we’ll go ahead and do that next.

Step Ten: Click on SHOW STORYBOARD. Click on MAKE TITLES OR CREDITS in the sidebar. Select ADD TITLE AT BEGINNING OF MOVIE. Type in whatever you want; on mine, for instance, this is where I wrote One Night With You in the top field, and By Jane E. Jones in the bottom field. Now, for every place you want words, to tell the ‘story’ for your movie, do the following: On the STORYBOARD, click on your image, to select it. In the sidebar, select MAKE TITLES OR CREDITS, the select ADD TITLE AFTER SELECTED CLIP or BEFORE SELECTED CLIP, wherever you want to place the words. You can also select your effects, text, and text color here. You can EDIT TITLES at any time. You can easily do this by right clicking on the text in your storyboard, as well.

Step Eleven: When you’ve finished with that, Select MAKE TITLES OR CREDITS, then CREDITS AT THE END OF THE MOVIE. Add your credits. To get more blanks, simply hit ENTER on your keyboard a couple of times.

Step Twelve: Add your VIDEO EFFECTS as we did in step seven. Now we’ll add VIDEO TRANSITIONS. Under EDIT MOVIE, click on VIEW VIDEO TRANSITIONS.

Step Thirteen: Click and drag desired effect to the blank BETWEEN your images on the STORYBOARD. FADE is my favorite but there are many cool ones.

Step Fourteen: Click on SHOW TIMELINE and scroll to the end of the music. Click on the end and drag the red arrow to the left, to the end of your video. Go a little too long, so you can fade out the music instead of ending it abruptly. RIGHT CLICK on the music line, and select FADE OUT. Play back the move to see if you’ve dragged the music long enough. You may have to make the music a little longer to get the correct fade out.

Step Fifteen: Play back your video and enjoy what you’ve created!

Step Sixteen: Save. Do some last minute tweaking. When everything is EXACTLY as you want it, go to FILE, SAVE MOVIE FILE, MY COMPUTER. Once that is done, you have your video. Go to MYSPACE, YOUTUBE, etc, and you can then upload your video.

Have fun with it! By the time you’re finished with your first video, the second one will be much easier and you’ll be an old hand at it. Enjoy! Let me know when you’ve made your video, I’d love to see it!

~Jane

Tags: tutorial, Video trailer