Like a movie trailer, a book trailer offers a multi-sensory experience which communicates the purpose of the book.
This trailer distills the book’s 340 pages into 180 seconds.
As you will see and hear, there are multiple components in creating a trailer. I started with writing the script. I asked myself, “What do I want you to know about this book, in 120 seconds or less?” And while I couldn’t quite get it down to 120 seconds, I managed to convey the gist of 340 pages in mere minutes.
It was clear that I would narrate the script. After all, I wrote it and knew how it sounded it in my mind. A work of this nature demands authenticity, and there is no substitute for one’s own voice in a personal narrative.
Narration needs music. There again, we had an obvious choice: we’d be using the music from the DARE TO MATTER audiobook. Its intense, mostly triumphant notes were the perfect subscript to the core message.
And then we needed images. We identified the highlights of the story and found images that were compatible with both the script and the book’s message. And some images will actually be obscure until the book is read. For example, the skates and the snow are images that have a deep relevance in the context of the story.
Producing a trailer is enormously gratifying, once you surmount the many frustrations along the way of trying to articulate the creative vision and then to concretize it in a way that works on many levels.
Have we accomplished our intentions; what do you think?
