Two weeks ago, together with three wonderful participants from Poland, we embarked on a book-trailers making laboratory. The goal was to train the participants in the basics of videomaking and to introduce them to the concept of book-trailers: a short promotial video that presents the main characterics of a book that we want to promote to a wider audience.
Creating a book-trailer is for sure a challenging but useful exercise, it not only require the full set of literary skills, but also of some more technical skills that belong to the videomaking world and it was a pleasure to share with the three participants my knowledge and expertise as a professional video editor and upcoming director.
We started the laboratory with an introduction to media literacy: how movies and other media operate on our subconscious to transmit a message, for example through the use of sad or happy music, or with quick cuts during action scenes to make them look more frenetic.
Then every participant presented the book they brought from hom with them, explaining the plot, the key aspects and informations about the authors, something akin to a little book club meeting where everybody showed how passionate they were about reading. So we started soon after to strategise on how we could make a short video that collected all of the book’s information, being careful to not say too much bceause we wanted to promote the book, not spoil the ending.
All of these more theoretical meetings were then followed by the more practical aspect of realising a book trailers: choosing the style we wanted to follow, looking for images and videos on the internet that could fit that style.
Most importantly, the participants were invited to spend an afternoon outdoor to film the scenes they needed and that they couldn’t find online, and also meeting with a group of locals from Soverato that they too were learning the art of making book trailers and so they all met and started sharing their love for books and the books they chose to promote; the italian participants even offered themselves to help our international guests in realising some clips they could need, by starring in them as actors.
Then, on the last day of the course, the participants started the editing process, some of them had no experience in video editing but they happily took up the challenge and realised some wonderful book trailers that we later showed to all our guests and staff with great success.
Author: Pietro Saltatetti – JUMP Trainer
