Assignment A -- Book Trailers

I started working on my book trailers by drafting each individual trailer script in Word. I then recorded my voiceovers in GarageBand, editing the script as I went along to modify its length. In general, I was aiming for roughly 2-minute-long scripts. Once the audio was in GarageBand, I exported it out to iTunes as an AAC audio file. Next, I assembled a list of images that I wanted to accompany the voice-over. Then, I used Google images to search for Creative Commons-licensed image files that matched my requirements. I also looked for Creative Commons-licensed audio tracks for the videos and found a site called 1001pianos.com that had a bunch of piano-based tracks that I could use.

Then, I started assembling the videos in iMovie, using my own transitions for the first video, and then using some of iMovie’s themes for the second two videos: I used the comic book theme for the video on American Born Chinese and the scrapbook theme for the video on One Crazy Summer. Once all the images were in place, I laid over the audio track with my voice-over and a second audio track for the music.  I found I needed to turn down the second music track to roughly 25% volume, so as to not drown out my voiceover.  It took me a little while to learn how to time the images in step with the audio track, but after a bit, I was content with the synch-work between the two.  I exported the video to medium quality .m4v files (640 x 360).  I set up a YouTube account and uploaded the videos as I completed them. I later had to delete the first two videos and re-upload them, since I had edited them for better sound mixing.

I first did the video for Holes, then worked on the video for American Born Chinese, and finally One Crazy Summer.  By the time I had done three videos, I was not happy with the quality of my first video, so I re-edited it, adding different transitions between the images and re-doing the audio voice-over track.  The new voice-over meant re-doing the timing of the images, but I was pleased with the final result.  I still think it’s the weakest of my three videos, but mostly it was how I learned to use the software; I have never used iMovie or GarageBand before this week. I also re-edited the American Born Chinese trailer to turn down the volume of the background music.

Book Trailer for Holes by Louis Sachar:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbSBujSYOU4

Book Trailer for American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3F7BWQdeu7o 

Book Trailer for One Crazy Summer by Rita Williams-Garcia:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JsgEVaH7f5I