Tag Archives: movie editing

How to Make a Book Trailer: Part One

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clapper_klmckeeA hot trend in publishing these days is to make a media trailer to call attention to a book and its author. Whether you are an educator who’s written a textbook or a novelist, you may be considering a book trailer to reach a wider audience.

First off, what is a book trailer? A book trailer is a video that briefly summarizes what the book is about and what the reader will get out of it. Most people are familiar with movie trailers, which are used to advertise films. A movie trailer is typically composed of clips from the full-length film, which are strung together to give a preview of what the movie is all about. The whole point is to stimulate people’s interest and encourage them to go see the movie. A book trailer is very similar, except that it is advertising a written document instead of a cinematic product.

Why would an author need a book trailer? As a recently published author, I am aware of how difficult it is to get a book onto the radar of potential readers. A book trailer can be a very effective way to promote a book, along with all the traditional approaches of book marketing. A growing number of people are searching for information in the form of video. The public is already primed for visual advertisements such as movie trailers; so a book trailer is a form of advertisement that is readily understood by the public. That’s the good news. The bad news is that it can be expensive to hire someone to create a trailer for your book. Your publisher may not be willing to cover that cost, or you may be self-published and cannot afford it.

So what do you do?

Well, you can consider creating the book trailer yourself. It was a no-brainer for me to create a book trailer to advertise my ebook on how to make science videos. As I explain in my book, how we communicate has changed radically in the past few years, and having multimedia skills, such as videography, opens a whole new world of opportunity for anyone whose livelihood depends on getting a message out to end-users. In the past, one needed a trained film crew to make a video, but today we have inexpensive equipment that can capture high-definition images (even an iPhone can record 1080p video), powerful movie editing software that is cheap and easy to use (apps for mobile devices cost less than $10.00 US), and free video-sharing sites that make it easy to show your movie trailer to the world.

In this series of posts, I explain the process I went through to create a book trailer for The Scientist Videographer and then provide a tutorial to show an easy way to make one yourself with an iPad (or other mobile device).

Step One: Study Examples of Trailers. Watch a few book trailers and study what makes them effective and what aspects detract (ask yourself which parts make you want to buy the book and which ones turn you off). You want to peruse book trailers that advertise books in a variety of categories but especially those in your specific specialty. You want to know how the top sellers in your book category are structuring their trailers so that you can better decide whether to go along with the crowd or make a trailer that sets you apart from your competitors. By watching a variety of trailers for other types of books, you may get some good ideas for your particular book that will make it seem unique to potential readers. Oh, and you might also want to watch a few movie trailers as well. Hollywood has been successfully selling movies for decades; so you may pick up some good pointers from the experts.

Here are a few sites where you can watch some book trailers (and movie trailers). Note that I’m not saying these are good or bad examples, just examples to study:

http://www.booktrailersforreaders.com/

http://www.quirkbooks.com/stuff-categories/book-trailers

https://www.pinterest.com/librarygerbils/book-trailers/  (you have to follow the links to YouTube to watch the videos)

http://www.imdb.com/

In the next post, I will explain step two: Hone your story.

 

How to Insert a Watermark Into Your Science Video

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Those of us who make science videos put a lot of time and effort into our projects.  So it is very annoying when someone uses our video content without attribution. Most of us want people to use our videos but it’s important to be credited for our work, just as we expect people to credit our technical publications when they describe our research findings.

Although video sharing sites such as YouTube recommend that users credit YouTube as the distributor AND the video content owner, no one is required to do so.

One way to protect your content is to insert a watermark into your video. Inserting your name or a logo that appears in every frame in your video effectively identifies you as the content creator and owner. This will not guarantee your work won’t be taken and used without attribution, but it will make it a bit more difficult.

What should be used as a watermark and how do you add it to your video? This tutorial shows three ways to accomplish this. I will be using Screenflow and iMovie 11 to illustrate, but you can adapt these methods to any movie-editing application. Be sure to select the HD version and full screen for best viewing.

How to Make a Video Abstract for Your Next Journal Article

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As I’ve tried to demonstrate in this blog, video is a fantastic way to show off your research in a way that goes far beyond the traditional text-based paper. Today, I’d like to talk about a specific use of video to augment scientific articles. Science journals are beginning to publish video abstracts along with technical papers, an approach that is designed to increase the visibility of authors and their work.

What is a video abstract? A video abstract is a brief description of a technical paper in which the author(s) explain their work on camera, physically demonstrate their methods, use animations or simulations to illustrate concepts, and/or discuss the implications of their findings. By using video and other multimedia, authors can explain their work in a way that the print article cannot, an approach that provides a richer, more diverse experience for the readership. The following is a video abstract I created with a smartphone to demonstrate how easy it is.

Example of a video abstract:

Transcript of video abstract:

Download (PDF, 42KB)

Why would an author want to create a video abstract? Video allows much greater flexibility to an author in describing their work and to more effectively explain the significance of their findings. By posting a video on the internet, an author can raise the visibility of themselves and their research. Because search engines rank video high in relation to text-based descriptions, a video abstract can make an author’s work more visible and accessible to people searching for papers on that topic.

What journals or publishers accept video abstracts? At the moment, several science journals routinely accept video abstracts, including the New Journal of Physics and Cell, to name a couple. Other journals are experimenting with video abstracts but have only published a few so far. Many of these video abstracts are hosted on a YouTube channel (rather than the publisher website), which then means that the author can embed the video on their own website without worry of copyright infringement.  If journals in your field do not currently publish video abstracts, you can still prepare and publish your own video abstracts for any of your papers.

How do I make a video abstract if I do not have a media specialist to help me? So far, there are few guidelines or tutorials available to guide authors in this regard. In the tutorial below, I show how to create an effective, engaging, and professional-looking video abstract entirely with a smartphone. I emphasize use of a smartphone because many people already own one and know how to use it to shoot photos and video, the quality of the cameras in smartphones is high (and getting better), and movie editing software for smartphones is cheap and easy to use. These points are especially important for scientists working in developing countries and who have limited resources and budgets.

Make a Video Abstract Tutorial:

Transcript of tutorial:

Download (PDF, 54KB)

How to Create a Science Video with your iPhone

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Scientists and students:  How much time would you invest to learn how to produce an informative and effective science video, requiring only an iPhone or other Smartphone that shoots video? In this new 15 minute tutorial, you can learn how to plan, shoot, edit, and share a professional-looking video that describes a research project, an important science topic or research finding, or a new method.

Such videos can then be used to meet the Broader Impacts criterion of the National Science Foundation or other funding agency, as supplemental online information for your journal publications, or just to enhance your website and show off your work.

All you need is an iPhone or other Smartphone that shoots video and supports the necessary software to edit the footage. Note that this tutorial is different from the one I previously posted, which used the Videolicious app. In this tutorial, I use the iMovie app for the iPhone (download from the App Store) and briefly show how to navigate the program to create a movie project.

Check it out:

There are other movie-editing apps and, of course, professional editing software that provide more bells and whistles, but these take more time to learn and are more expensive. The iMovie app for the iPhone is designed to use video shot with the iPhone, but you can also import media shot with a camcorder or digital camera (I use iTunes to transfer files from iPhoto to my iPhone camera roll). You will also notice that I included some animations that I created with PowerPoint and Photoshop, exported as movies, and uploaded to my iPhone. See previous tutorials for more information about doing animations in Powerpoint here and here.

Even though most of my videos are shot with a camcorder and edited on my computer with professional software, I increasingly find it easy and convenient to use my iPhone to capture video on the go and to quickly edit the footage and upload to a video-sharing site. As the cameras on these smartphones have improved, the quality of the images has gotten better and better. There has even been a full-length movie shot with a Smartphone (Nokia): go here to see the trailer and behind-the-scenes footage.

I hope you find this tutorial helpful and inspires you to use your iPhone or Smartphone to produce videos about your science projects.

Use Online Interviews in Your Science Video

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An effective technique to use when you cannot afford to interview your subject in person or at their field site, is to do an online interview via Skype or similar service. You can record your computer screen while your interviewee answers your questions online. Then all you have to do is edit in footage and still images illustrating the points that your subject mentions. Here is an example of one such video:

meltingglaciers_photo