HOW TO MAKE A BOOK VIDEO TRAILER Part Two: The Script

(For Part 3 of this series click here.)

Your trailer is an ad for a story. It’s a story that exists on the page only. Though it lacks visuals, it still has a plot, a mood, characters and events. (Note: I’m limiting this topic to fiction). Thus your book offers the same basic experience as a movie. And so this promo should be approached as if you are selling a movie. Studying different types of film trailers will show you the rhythm of the editing, the importance of sound effects and music, and the difference between trailers for drama, thrillers and comedy.

Before you write the script for your trailer, please consider these three points.

Can we agree on one thing? Novels are meant to provoke. You’re prodding a certain response from the reader. What is the reaction you want to provoke in your book? Really think about this. Maybe you want the reader to laugh and have fun, or quiver with fear, be spiritually uplifted, or feel exquisite melancholy. So your trailer should give a hint, a promise, of that experience. For example, when writing my script for the Jane Was Here promo, I wanted to give the viewer the same feeling of eerie creepiness and foreboding that my book does. And accomplish all that in two minutes.

Item two: Obviously you want to create curiosity, too. As in a movie trailer, at the end of two minutes the viewer should want to see more.

Item three: find the movie in the book. Many writers fantasize about their books being made into films. What scenes stand out to you as most dramatic (that don’t contain spoilers)? Is there one scene or moment that can stand alone in representing the whole book? For example, when I wrote my book Jane Was Here, I tried to capture the reader in the early pages with one scene that I knew would awake tantalizing questions. A mysterious young woman calling herself Jane shows up in a small town, knocks on a door, and announces that this is her house. She says she was born and grew up here. Yet she’s never been here before in her life. How is that possible? Who is Jane? What’s she looking for? Why is she so weird? What happened to her in this house long ago? Is she dangerous? Since this scene succeeded in hooking readers in the book, it became the natural choice for the trailer.

If you have more than one scene from the book you want to use, you probably do not have time for both within two minutes. Hence you are now in montage territory. Most trailers are made up of short snatches anyway.

What images and/or sounds best represent your book? Are there motifs? Look how the promo for Brunonia Barry’s The Lace Reader uses motifs to make you want to know more:


The motifs here are lace, and a key. (Note: black-and-white photography is a clever choice her because it subtly establishes Barry’s book as classy not cheesy. Music videos often do this to make a song seem artier.)

Having pondered the above three points, you’re ready to make a stab at writing the first draft of your trailer script. Let yourself go and don’t worry whether your chosen scene or montage is practical on a budget. Write as if your book has already been made into a movie and you’re giving a taste of the goodies a moviegoer can expect. Avoid static or still images unless you plan to program some camera movement in the editing stage (indicate what kind of moves in your script). Play my trailer below, and you’ll see an illustration that isn’t static because I start close on one detail and then continually pull out until the picture transforms into something different.

Now add the hype.

Repeat the title at least twice, even better three times, to get it in the viewers’ heads. If you have any quotes that reduce to a few words (“gripping,” “hilarious beyond belief”) flash them at intervals.

Plan to show the book cover’s title graphic, too. (A caveat: using the whole cover is a little harder because a book is a vertical oblong and a film image stretches horizontally, so you can’t get the cover to fill the screen. Anyway, you deal with that problem in editing.)

Consider movie-trailer-style voice-over if you know someone or can cast someone with a professional-sounding voice. “A man. A woman. A building on fire. Only one will get out.” Don’t do voice-over yourself unless you are offering a personal narrative, as in a memoir: “The day I found out I had cancer...”

When you have a first draft, it should be like a wish list. Now it’s time to get real. If your book is a historical epic, then maybe you’ve done a montage of battle scenes. If it’s sci-fi fantasy, your scenes or images are heavy in special effects. You know perfectly well that to shoot these would cost millions of dollars.

But don’t rule them out. See if you can translate these scenes into a montage of snippets from other movies. Let’s go back to the example of a battle scene montage. You can grab these images from other war films or archival footage, off DVDs or whatever: quick shots of pounding horse hooves, swords slicing through the air, or explosions and planes taking off, airships landing. Capturing film clips is standard in this YouTube age. Just don’t use iconic or easily recognizable images from famous films, like the blood gushing down the hotel corridor in The Shining. Go to the more obscure B-list movies, or foreign films, or flops. Also don’t show recognizable actors’ faces. This announces you’ve stolen the material, and you want this to look as original as possible.

Suddenly your ambitious first-draft now looks affordable.

If you have a comedy or drama which best engages a viewer by showing a scene or two from the book, then you’re going to have to shoot your trailer with actors in a studio or on location. With Jane Was Here, I chose a two-person scene, with a Victorian house exterior. Very affordable. In the next post I’ll get into the technical production aspect of a trailer shoot. In the meantime, by way of example, below is the final script plus the finished trailer for Jane Was Here.






LOCATION: SMALL TOWN IN NEW ENGLAND. STREET WITH SMALL VICTORIAN HOUSE. NIGHT.





INT. FOYER - HOUSE - 3 A.M. - HOT SUMMER NIGHT

CLOSE-UP ON a frosted, etched PANEL IN THE FRONT DOOR. A
SHADOW APPEARS behind the glass. The SHAPE OF A HEAD comes
closer. A HAND on the pane. Then a knuckle RAP-RAP-RAPS.

CUT TO:
COVER GRAPHIC OVER BLACK:
JANE WAS HERE

A NOVEL BY

SARAH KERNOCHAN

FOOTSTEPS APPROACH. SOUND OF KNOB TURNING....

CUT TO:

SAME ANGLE ON DOOR PANEL as it SWINGS OPEN to reveal:

A YOUNG WOMAN, about 22, standing in the street outside this
decrepit Victorian house. She wears grimy sneakers and
clamdiggers, and carries a small duffel. Pale, thin, with
lank tangled hair, she has the childish face of a waif.

JANE
Hello, sir.

She looks up pleadingly at:

REVERSE ANGLE

BRETT, 28, tall, awkward and a touch nerdy, stands in the
doorway. He's dead tired from being up all night working.

BRETT
(wary)
Hi. Can I help you?

YOUNG WOMAN
I'm Jane.

BRETT
Yes. Are you looking for someone?

JANE
This is my house.

BRETT
I've rented it for the summer. I
don't know the owner, are you
related?

She shakes her head solemnly, speaking in a curiously prim,
old-fashioned manner.

JANE
I don't know anyone in this town.
Yet I feel sure, I was born here,
in this very house. And then...
something happened to me. I can't
remember. Sir, may I come in?

BRETT
(annoyed)
Jane, it's three a.m. Come back in
the daytime.

He starts to close the door, but she pushes against it.

JANE
Please - please! I have nowhere
else to go!

Surprised, he pauses. She gazes up at him desperately.

JANE (CONT'D)
I am looking for myself.

CUE UP SPOOKY MUSIC AND...

CUT TO:

OVER BLACK:

WHO IS JANE?

ANIMATION - LINE CROSSES OUT "IS" AND WRITES OVER IT:

WAS

WHO IS JANE?

CUT TO:





CU 19TH CENTURY WOMAN SEATED BEFORE MIRROR. BEGIN SLOWLY
PULLING BACK...

CAMERA FINISHES PULL BACK. IMAGE IS NOW SEEN AS A DEATH'S
HEAD.

CUT TO:

OVER BLACK: QUOTES FLY TOWARD CAMERA: "EERIE" - "HAUNTING" -
"TERRIFYING" - "KEPT ME UP AT NIGHT" - "SEDUCTIVE" -
"CHILLING" - "NOTHING SHORT OF MAGIC"

CUT TO:





OVER BLACK: ZOOM SLOWLY TOWARD TITLE "JANE WAS HERE"

CUT TO:

RECAP JANE CLOSE-UP:

JANE
I am looking for myself.

CUT TO:

FRONT COVER SHOT. AVAILABILITY, WEBSITE, ETC.

SUPER:

Coming June 2011

MUSIC ENDS.

For Part 3 of this series click here.

SCREENPLAY VS. NOVEL – PART TROIS

Finishing up from the previous blog, I offer some more differences between writing screenplays and novels.

Very few people will read your script. After friends and partners, you have your agent, manager, executives, producers. Maybe 50-60 people. If it gets produced, then actors, casting agents, designers and technicians will then read it – an average of 100 people. A lot of these people actually hate reading scripts (I know I do). So that’s your reading public.

With a published novel, you can realistically hope that far more than 100 people will read what you wrote. To a screenwriter, this is intoxicating.

You own your novel. You don’t own your script once you sell it.

A novel is quiet. In a typical screenwriter contract, you have 3 months of quiet as you write the first draft and then the noise begins: otherwise called feedback, notes or “thoughts.” Mind you, some notes actually do help the script. But more often they range from unworkable to insane.

With a novel, you can have years of quiet. This may be more solitude than some writers want. I revel in it. There will be changes tactfully requested (instead of demanded) by agent, editor and publisher, but you are still the one to decide to implement their advice or not.

When film professionals read your script, they are deciding whether to do it or not. Your story represents one, ten, fifty, in a few cases a hundred million dollars to be spent. It doesn’t matter how great your writing is, but what’s it going to cost? A page is a minute of screen time. 125 pages are too long. A producer will ask you to cut 20. A director will rewrite the opening – or the whole thing. An actress wants to improvise her dialogue in stead of saying what you wrote, or an actor wants you to make his part bigger than his co-star’s. Everybody’s got a hand in. And then if you don’t succeed in delivering what they want…

When you’re a novelist they can’t replace you with another writer.

Writing Jane Was Here I experienced a kind of autoerotic pleasure from just writing for myself. I could go on at any length, take as long as I wanted, and glory in a wealth of words, knowing there would be no crowd of people waiting to interfere.

Now comes the challenge of enticing readers. Who will spark to Jane, a reincarnation-themed paranormal-mystery-suspense-thriller? Next blog: creating the book trailer.

PAGING 'JANE'

People often ask me what it's like to write a novel after 30 years of writing screenplays. But even more often they ask, "Why?" Why leave a job being paid, and paid well, for writing 100 pages in three months? Sometimes you're even paid a ridiculous sum by the week, hanging around the set until someone needs a quickie rewrite. And how about the thrill of seeing your name writ huge on the screen; of knowing that hundreds of people and beaucoup bucks were employed to manifest your crazy ideas?

Let's be frank. Business is slow now in movieland. An aging writer, and a woman at that, is routinely passed over for any genre except romantic comedy. There's plenty of work in indies - better quality and infinitely more rewarding than studio projects, and even at the low pay scale you can make a good living by saying yes to everything and stacking your plate with assignments.

But there's also a very disturbing new trend right now: a lot of producers ask you to write for free (on spec), and your reps actually encourage you to do it. So if you're going to work for nothing, why not write what you really want to?
And I really wanted to write a novel. The last one I wrote (Dry Hustle) was published in 1977, before I got sidetracked into scriptwriting and documentaries. During all those 35 years, I waited to get the one book idea that would seize me so hard I couldn't not write it, because writing long-form fiction requires not just stamina but mania. Instead, over and over the ideas that sprang to my head were for films. I despaired that I was irreversibly condemned to the movie rut with my one good trick. No matter that people envied me for it. All I had ever wanted since the age of 14 was to write books.
My husband and I routinely spend summers at a family home in Martha's Vineyard. We are not on vacation: there is always a lot of writing to be done. Summer of  2006 was the first time I happened not to have a script job.  If I have nothing to write, I have no idea what to do with myself.  I'm gloomy, snarky, and captious. I develop weird unconscious habits like squeezing my face.

And then I got the Idea, and the idea was Jane. A crime is committed and remains hidden for 150 years. All those involved have long since died - and been reincarnated in the present. They remember nothing of their past lives. They are all lured as if by cosmic appointment to the town where the crime occurred. In walks the victim, Jane, with a fragmentary memory of what happened in 1853. And karma settles the rest.

I experienced such forward thrust when I got the idea that I couldn't even wait to outline the story. I simply began. The characters coalesced faster than I could write. The plot thickened so rapidly that I myself was rooted to the page, wondering what would happen next. Script jobs interfered. Ordinarily grateful for work, I bristled at being taken away from the book. After three years of only being able to work on Jane Was Here in my spare time, I announced to my reps that I was taking a leave, a dangerous thing to do in the film business because everyone forgets about you. But I finished the book, then went back and rewrote most of it. Blood, sweat and tears? Nah. Pure joy, all the way, every day.

So when people ask "Why?" I say that, like Jane, I'm coming home again.