I love movie trailers, especially the really good and long ones you see while at a movie theater. A few weeks ago, I heard someone mention “book trailer” and I scratched my head. How can you take a novel and make it into a movie? The thought enticed me.
Apparently, this is a thing. A BIG thing. Today, I played with iMovie and whipped out a quick trailer for my novel. It was SUPER EASY (though, mine’s not great–all of you with more creative talent than me will easily be able to put together a fantastic one.)
It’s super simple. Here’s what I did.
- Downloaded iMovie for my iphone.
- Found the template for the canned movie trailer I wanted HERE (I wasn’t going to plan it out, but it turned out this was a critical step.) I broke my book blurb into chunks to fill each of the scenes/slides.
- Using PIXABAY to download images and CANVA to add the text to the photos I created the slides.
- I dragged and dropped them into position, modified the motion a little, and HORRAY, here it is. (Yeah, I know, it moves too fast and is kinda cheesy, but I had fun. That’s what counts, right?) Sorry if you’re sick of hearing about my novel already. I’ll be moving on someday, I promise! 😉
- Now, I need to modify mine a little–cut down on text perhaps…then figuring out what the heck to do with it. (Facebook & Twitter here I come!)
Joynell Schultz, Author 
I liked it a lot but the text is super hard to read in the time you give each slide. So give just like 2 seconds more per slide.
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The downside, you can’t adjust the slide length. They have it timed to music. Maybe there’s a backdoor way… or I shorten the text up some with my revisions.
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ahhh. then shorter text yeah. I felt like the pressure to get the words negatively affected the impact.
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Not bad for your first try!!! Better than I could do!
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It was really just an excuse not to write. Sometimes I need that break.
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Marketing your book is a great way to do that.
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Looks great. Thanks for sharing.
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OMG, I’m so proud of you. For a first time, that’s great. I didn’t think it was cheesy at all, but it did move a bit too fast to read the words sometimes. So many questions. Did you have to buy the photos? Did you have to buy the music for the trailer? Can you download iMovie into your computer/laptop? Be careful, you might get requests. Hehe.
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Thanks for the kind words. The photos were free from Pixabay.com (except the one I used for my novel cover of the woman with the gun. That one I bought from istock photos.) The trailer was all set up with music, scene timing, and number of scenes. I wish there was more flexibility there, but then it’d probably get super complicated. I could have fixed the speed issue then. I don’t think iMovie can be done on a PC. I got lucky because I have an iphone. It’d work on an ipad too or apple/mac. I’m sure there are other ones for the PC, but I was looking for some quick and easy distractions from writing.
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Ahh. Thanks for answering, Joynell. Keep up the good work.
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good first effort and certainly there are other ways to make movie trailers that give you more flexibility–greater timing between slides for sure, and more timing to read your credits. good job!
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Even if I had a great one, I’m still not quite sure what to do with it. Someday I’ll polish this up better.
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