At last! Some Book Project Sneak Peeks…
One of the things our publisher does is have each of their authors create a short video about their book. A movie trailer of sorts – but for a book.
Artisan suggested we hire a little film/editing crew to do it, but like true DIYers we took it as a lively challenge to see how much we could do ourselves. So we came up with an outline, wrote a little script, hired a local video genius to shoot it for us (who also happens to be our brother in law) and edited it ourselves in Final Cut Pro back in March. And now that we are two months away from the official book release date (Nov 6th, aka Election Day) we are at last allowed to share it! Wahoo.
We had to finish the video so early because our publisher needed it for a spring sales conference in March, so as soon as we got back from Hawaii the pressure was on (see how bare the trees are in this pic?). Thankfully all of the projects were already wrapped up for when we shot all of the book photography over three weeks at our house in February, so one day of shooting video and setting up little impromptu vignettes was not too tricky. It was in fact truly lively.
The funniest thing is that we handed in our outline for all of the projects in the book about a year before this video was shot, so at last seeing the projects in real life in a polished format like this (since it was well before we saw any final book proofs) was kind of surreal. I guess it is akin to baking a cake for a year or two and at last getting to taste it.
The weirdest part by far was recording our nerdy little voice over (while sitting in a closet using our iPhones) and layering that in there. Allow us to share this reenactment so you can picture it (Burger was playing the role of “Supervisor”):
And for those of you at work who cannot watch videos, here are a few still shots (there are a lot more sneak peeks of various projects in the video though):
We are so relieved to at last be able to reveal some of the projects in the book – even if it is only a small portion for now. Thankfully in less than two months the book will be out (you can pre order it here) so all those kitties will be out of the bag. Cannot wait! Free the kitties!
Have you folks ever written a video script and attempted to make a somewhat polished little YouTube ditty? It is kinda lively, right? The clothesline concept was all John’s – and we enjoy how it allowed us to squeeze in a few bonus project peeks. I’d say previewing 15 projects in a little over a minute is fairly speedy, indeed. You know we like to cram stuff in there (slash are terrible secret keepers). Woot!
