Creating Multi-Media Slideshows and "Book Trailers" Using Windows Movie Maker

Being handy in digital arts, website/HTML design, and digital media can give any writer or author an edge when it comes to promoting their works online or elsewhere. Now, don't get me wrong - you could be the most fantastic webmaster or the most skilled digital artist around, but if your writing is simply not "up to snuff" and marketable, all the flashes, glimmers, and "blings" in the world isn't going to mean a thing. However, if there's one thing folks can agree on in the book world is the growing trend of publishing houses spending less money on real-time marketing and encouraging authors to "self-market" themselves through a variety of means.

Somewhere along the line, this means money spent out of an author's pocket; either in registering a domain name for their website, monthly hosting fees for their website, registering with search engines, and perhaps even hiring folks to do all the digital "grunt work" for them. Depending on your personal "techie" skills, this may be a necessary evil: let's be honest, you're a writer, not a cyber-head, right? If you're not already familiar with some computer basics, your best bet is to pour all your efforts into developing your craft, not trying to work your way around the confusing and glitzy cyber-world trying to figure out Myspace, YouTube, and book trailers.

Of course, if you are at least somewhat familiar with the workings of Windows XP and other computer applications, it wouldn't be too hard to put together some rather nice looking streaming video presentations featuring either the latest new craze - "book trailers" - you at a book show or signing, lecturing to a group of students, or even some behind the scenes looks at how you go about brainstorming, creating characters and key plot points, or just about your daily life (let's skip the footage of you brushing your teeth and taking a shower, okay?).

After making such a video presentation, you don't have to be an "Internet Maven" to figure out HOW to get this shiny, impressive, Hollywood-bound video clip on your website, blog, or even Myspace, thanks to YouTube. With YouTube, you can upload any video clip for free, (for now, that is), and not only will your video be available to the YouTube audience, YT also generates HTML code, (don't worry, this isn't hard), that with a simple "cut and paste", will allow you to insert the video onto your website, blog, or Myspace.

First of all, before I get into all the tech-speak and computer-nerd "nitty gritty", let's just spend a few moments kicking around a few reasons why you might want to undertake such a horrific adventure in the first place, before I start throwing computer terms at you. First of all, our world is becoming more and more computer and media driven than it ever has been before. While it hasn't been inherently proved one way or the other if the Internet is going to be next great marketing ground for novels, it's certainly the new "front line": just hop onto Myspace and enter "authors/writers" into the search field and see what you find - and that's only a infinitesimally small drop of water in a pretty big ocean. Writers are flocking to the Internet like never before; everyone wants a piece of the "digital pie".

You can get a Myspace, Shoutlife, or blog for free....but let's face it; we are living in a generation that has a horribly short attention span by nature. Unfortunately, the average Joe/Jane usually flicks their eyes over a website, and if nothing is moving, flashing, or pulsing, they end up surfing on. Now, if you're a mega-selling author like Dean Koontz or Stephen King, no problem: you can hire some talented website designer to do your whole website in Flash - an interactive type of site design - and you'll have all the motion, sound effects, special effects you could possibly want. For the rest of all us average folks; even the moderately successful authors, we're a little more on our own.

So, the more moving media you can offer on your website/Myspace/blog; something, anything to grab visitors' attention and get them to stay for a bit, the better. The following tutorial on creating streaming video presentations in Windows Movie Maker is a great way to do that - and if you have Windows XP, Movie Maker comes standard, and is therefore free.

Ah, yes, I said the magic word for all the rest of us writers who still have bills and mortgages that need to be paid...free.

Book trailers are the new big thing that even bestselling authors are sporting. If you're not familiar with the term, a "book trailer" is like a movie trailer before a feature presentation, a video that acts as a "teaser" for a novel or piece of work. I know, I know - book folks everywhere are caving into the 21^st Centuries' obsessive need for visual excitement...but what are you going to do? Head to YouTube, type in "book trailers" and see the results; there's even a Myspace page devoted to promoting book trailers throughout Myspace.

Now, the kicker is this: to create book trailers for your novel/anthology/short stories/poetry, you do need some practical, hands-on experience with Windows XP and you need to be familiar with some basic digital camera or Internet-related functions. Plus, there's the generation gap to consider: you'll either read this article with disdain, deeming the effort not worth your time, or you'll think to yourself - "Cool; let's get that on my website/Myspace/blog!". Just remember this, scoffers and disdainers - the more an author can do to help themselves, they better they'll be in the long run.

Now, deciding what to put into your book trailer, what type of vibe you want to project; whether you have the capability to use live action video or you're just going to use pictures is entirely up to you - you'll need to spend some time planning that whole thing out. I'm going to give you the nuts and bolts of the thing, and then let you play from there.

First of all, with as little fear and trepidation as we can manage, go ahead and boot up Windows XP, and when everything is all loaded, click the 'Start' button on the taskbar, and go to "Accessories" - this is where Movie Maker is usually found, and it looks like a multi-colored roll of film. Click it, and it will open the basic Movie Maker interface (see image 2). On the right is the preview window, in the middle is the "collections" area for all your imported footage, and on the left is a convenient list of tasks that takes you step-by-step through the process (see image 3). For now, we're going to assume we're all newbies at this, and decide to make a book trailer out of pictures and music, so the only two functions under #1 we're going to need are "Import Pictures" and "Import Audio or Music".

Now, let's say you've gone out to the internet to collect some pictures to create your slideshow. WARNING!!! There are a lot of great sites offering royalty-free pics, and even though it's unlikely you'll get slammed with a lawsuit for grabbing random pics off Google....you do so at your own risk. Doing that is fine for play and practice, but once you start using it to market your work for financial gain, make sure all your bases are covered. So, assuming you've taken care of all that, let's say you're creating a trailer for your creepy suspense or gory horror novel, and you've found some suitably creepy or disgusting photos to create this "teaser" trailer. Keep that word "teaser" in mind: your whole goal is to entice readers; you don't need to feel the pressure of telling the whole story with a bunch of assorted pictures.

Make sure you you've saved all your pictures in the 'My Pictures' folder, (see image 4), because when you click "Import Pictures" in Movie Maker, you'll go straight to that folder.

Let's begin, shall we?

Import Pictures: click on 'Import Pictures' and select the first picture you want to bring in, (see image 5), or bring them in all at once. Remember, it's good to have an idea what order you want these to go in but you can always play with that later. When you import all the pictures, they'll be assembled in the Collections area.

Create Titles: Let's make a very simple title to your book trailer. Go up to the taskbar, select "Tools", and then select "Titles and Credits". It's going to ask where we want to place this title: at the beginning, before a clip, (in this case, image), on a clip, or credits at the end. We're going to select "At the beginning". It's going to give us a text-box in which we can type our title. We can change animation styles by clicking "Change Animation Styles", and you'll find Movie Maker has an impressive array of animation styles for a free program. However, we'll let you play with that on your own time; same thing with font colors and sizes, too. For now, we'll accept the defaults we're given, and just make a basic title. The default animation is actually ideal for book trailers; type in the upper box and you get large font for the book's title; type in the lower field and you get smaller font for author subtitle. When you're happy, click "Done, add title to movie", and it will put your title on the first story-board spot.

Dragging Images to Storyboard: Luckily, we are living in the "drag and drop" world of computers, so this is dreadfully easy. Grab the image you think you'd like to have first, (you can always change your mind later), click on it, and then while holding the mouse button down, drag it to next available storyboard spot and "drop it". You'll see that it only makes a copy of the image, leaving a duplicate in the Collection area, so you can re-use that image. Now, repeat this step for as many images as you want in the trailer.

**Additional Titles: Interspersing titles throughout the trailer is pretty easy. This will take some forethought, but once you've got your idea set, go to "Tools", select "Titles and Credits", and this time select either "title before the selected clip" or "title after the selected clip". Then, you can put teaser titles throughout your trailer, such as "First Came the Love of All Loves", and then "Next...Came Betrayal", and then "Finally....REVENGE!".

Transitions: So now you have a full storyboard; we want to add some professional transitions to move smoothly from one picture to the next. This is also pretty easy; thanks to good old "drag and drop". Up at the top middle of the Movie Maker is a pull-down list that should read "Collections". Click on the arrow and pull down the list, and you'll see "Video Effects, Video Transitions, Collections" . Select Video Transitions, and you'll be greeted with a decent array of different types of transitions that you can click on and preview in the preview window to the left. Be creative, but I myself like to just stay with the simple "Fade".

Dragging the transitions down is simple; click on your desired transition, and "drag" it down and "drop" it on the small rectangle between the storyboard spots. Repeat this process between all your storyboard elements.

Credits: Always good to let folks know when and where your novel is coming out, right? Go to "Tools", select "Titles and Credits", and this time select "credits at the end". Using whatever animation catches your fancy, type in something like, "Coming, August 2008, to Dollar Stores Everywhere". Click 'Done', and it will automatically add this to the end.

Music: Now it's time to add the inspiring or chilling soundtrack music! The same warning for pictures goes with music; ripping CD's to get tunes for practice is fine, but not legally advisable when you start using those tunes for monetary gain. There are a lot of places that have royalty-free music for download and even sell CDs full of original, royalty-free music, and of course, like anything else - quality is often linked to how much you spend. My personal favorite is Sound Dogs.

The first thing you'll want to do is go right above the storyboard and click the little icon that says, "Show Timeline". This switches Storyboard view to Timeline view so you can add your music. Now, make sure you've saved whatever music file you're going to use to your "My Music" folder, because that's where clicking on "Import Audio or Music" is going to take you. Select the audio file just like you would a picture, and it will import it to your Collections area.

Now...drag and drop once again. Click on the audio file, and "drag it" to the timeline titled "audio/music", and drop it. You'll notice that unlike pictures, you can position the music in either direction on the timeline; you can have the tune start with the title, after the title, etc. Of course, say your music clip is longer than your book trailer. Take your cursor to the end of the audio clip, and a little red, bi-directional cursor will pop up. Click and drag back towards the end of your book trailer, evening things out. You can get your audio selection to fade out by "right clicking" on the audio, and selecting "Fade Out" on the pop-up box.

Export Movie:You've proofed it for errors, fiddling with the title animation; discarded "Sexy Back" by Justin Timberlake for something a little edgier for the soundtrack, and you're all ready to go. Go to "File" and select "Save Movie File". The movie wizard is then going to come up, asking where you'd like to save your awesome creation, and you'll select "My Computer", and click 'Next'. If you've never used MM before, its default is to save everything in My Videos, so the next box, you'll simply type in a name for the file, "booktrailer1" or something. Hit 'Next' again. This will bring you to another box that will determine how "large" your movie file will be. Movie Make chooses "Best option for playback on my computer" for you - blast these thinking machines! - but I don't recommend that. The third option down reads "Other Settings". Click that, and pull down the box full of a dizzying array of video formats - don't worry, instead of listening to the computer, you can listen to me instead (You're getting very sleepy...just kidding). Depending on your internet connection and the size of your server - if you have one - I suggest the middle of the road setting, "Video for Broadband (340 KBPS)". Click next....and you'll see the wonderful blue progress bar, and your movie is now being compiled.

Ending it all up: When you go to upload your video or copy it to CD, it will end with the file extension .WMV - standing for Windows Media Video. The best thing about this type of format is that it's very Internet compatible; even MACs had drivers they can install now-a-days to adapt to WMV files.

So go off and have some, be creative, and mind your legalities concerning copyrights and such. Check back here for two follow-up articles: Using Digital Video Files on Myspace/Websites/Blog, and Creating Promotional CDs. For Your Novel.