Happy Trailers to You

I am working on a book trailer for An Involuntary King: A Tale of Anglo Saxon England. It's fun, if rather flummoxing. After looking at a couple that Erastes put on Facebook I got that the trailers don't need to be, if you will excuse the expression, big productions. Erastes book trailer for Standish, a gay love story I quite enjoyed reading, is stark, with Henry Purcell's Pavane for a Dead Queen as the background music, and title cards with tempting phrases about the book. If i hadn't read it already, the trailer would have made me want to.

I decided to use a combination of Gregorian chant and sound effects of a sword battle as my background. I had originally planned to use some of a shield wall battle video I paid a French group called La Compagnie du Frankland, but I am not having any luck (yet) figuring out how to edit the video. I decided to use snapshots from it instead. My friend Liam Guilar of Lady Godiva and Me fame has one of those melt at his feet British voices , and he recorded a couple lines I wrote for the beginning of the trailer.. ooh.. I will listen to it over and over! The problem is that although I think the audio track I made is superb, it doesn't play when I wartch my video clip.. why not I don't know. I need it to in order to make sure the clips synchronize properly.

Still, I am a lot further than I thought I would be at this point.. if I can just find out why the audio track is silent, I will be in fat city.

The photo above is from the Frankland group's video taken at a festival in Russia in 2007 called Rusborg. You can find it on YouTube.

I promise to post my book trailer here as soon as it is fit for public viewing. If there are any Internet cideo wizzes out there who might offer advice... hawthorne@nanhawthorne.com .