Behind the Scenes of our Book Trailer

It’s only 3 weeks until the release of my new book, The Fuzzy Philosopher, and we are hard at work behind the scenes. These days you can’t release a new book without making a book trailer. A book trailer is like a movie preview, only for the book. Some are simple, shots of the books with a narrator explaining it, and some are quite intense with scenes from the book acted out in a manner befitting the latest blockbuster.
We don’t have the money for a full blown production, nor do we want just a simple and easy one. But of course we don’t have that much time or money, and we do have the tiny problem of living in a foreign country. We do have one very valuable resource at our disposal that we decided to take advantage of: our students.
Yep, we are going to dress up our students and make them act out scenes from the book for our movie trailer. The kids are doing everything: lighting, props, making costumes and, of course, acting.
We met last week for auditions. The students know we do Moo-Cow, they know we have a new book, but aside from that, they are a bit fuzzy on the details. So Ryan filled them in, explaining every character and what happens in the story.
Then we gave them the scripts and time to practice for their audition. In Moo-Cow, many of the characters are boys yet we had mostly girls show up to the audition. (95% of our students are female.) For Rhetorical, the grizzly old bear, we had to coach them to lower their voice and make it sound a bit, well, gravelly. It was quite funny as they practiced different voices. One girl thought her friend was more cackly witch than gruff old bear, but in the end, she got it.

After we picked the actors we had to have rehearsal. We met on a Sunday morning and Ryan reviewed the story and what happens in the script. Then we had them read their parts and in some cases we had to work on pronunciation.
Anyway, this will be a fun project even if it doesn’t turn out like we expect. While Ryan and I have made many a silly video in our lives (we were film majors after all), these kids haven’t had much opportunity to do it. They are too busy in high school (the school day lasts 12+ hours including homework) and unlike me, they were’t allowed to turn in videos instead of essay papers throughout school. So we thought this would be a great way for them to have some fun.
We have another rehearsal nest week, and after that we will do the filming. The video should be finished right as the book is released. Of course you can see it here first. The Fuzzy Philosopher Book Trailer Coming to a blog near you!