Temptation by Water: Book Trailer

I have finally finished my book trailer. To be more precise, I should say that I have finally mustered up the courage to release it to public view. Now why should that take courage? I guess for the same reasons it takes courage to go public with any creative endeavor. There's that inner voice that says, Maybe it really stinks. Maybe people will mock it—and me! Maybe it does my book a disservice. But then I took myself in hand, put those voices to silence, reminded myself that I put a lot of time and effort into this, and mustered up the courage to unveil my creation.

I obtained most of the photos from photoXpress. This site allows you to download up to 10 photos per day. They have an extensive selection of high quality photos. I also used Keypad, part of the Apple software in iWork, to make the clips with text and the opening cover page and the final author picture. Again, I borrowed my music track from Kevin MacLeod. Getting the right music is a challenge. It has to thematically fit the video and it has to be the right time length. I feel very fortunate to have found "What You Want," which fits my trailer for time but more importantly for theme and tone. I listened to a whole bunch of tracks, but as soon as I hit on this one, I knew it was just what I wanted.

I initially had at least three times as many pictures as I ended up using. Making a trailer for a poetry collection is a real challenge. How to capture the essence of a collection that contains 51 poems? How not to offer a plot summary when the collection is not a narrative one? How to get in everything you want? The answer to this last question is that you can't get in everything you want and still keep the video to the recommended maximum length of two minutes after which viewers hit the Pause button. So there are a lot of hard choices to be made, just as in revising a poem.

In the end, I zeroed in on what I perceive to be the collection's dominant thread—the idea of temptation—and the dominant recurring image—water. (This pretty much parallels the book's underlying structural plan.) Other motifs come in, but I'm not sure you'll recognize them as motifs without reading the book. My hope, of course, is that the trailer will tempt you to read the book.

So grab some popcorn or a box of Junior Mints and check out my movie.