Book Trailers
Curious City has found book trailers to be an incredible tool for telling a book’s story to online communities. With a well written script, professional narration, a series of carefully chosen images, and the pizazz (and patience) of production, a book trailer can speak more strongly than a book review.
Projects
For the book The Sandal Artist by Kathleen T. Pelley and illustrated by Lois Rosio Sprague we selected a supporting character in the book to stand in as an Italian storyteller…
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For Mercy: The Last New England Vampire we selected a young actress to play Hayley and her ancester Mercy that comes for her across the centuries…
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The project for the book Charlie Joe Jackson’s Guide to NOT Reading by Tommy Greenwald (Roaring Brook Press) is more of a PSA than book trailer. (In fact, Tommy already produced a hilarious trailer for the book here.) Knowing that Tommy’s audiobook was being produced by the fab folks at Brilliance Audio using the oh-so talented narrator MacLeod Andrews to voice the character, I pitched Brilliance a co-produced YouTube that promo’ed the book, the audio, and served as a summer promotion for libraries. Tommy and I wrote the script, I story boarded it with the illustrations from the book by J.P. Coovert, and Brilliance produced the sound. This was the satisfying result…
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It was a joy to capture the playfulness and humor of Kathleen T. Pelley’s, Raj the Bookstore Tiger (Charlesbridge). The script, a salute to the power of words and books and those that purvey them, came in on cat feet. Katherine Davis voiced the script with an unexpected (and welcomed) puckishness and Bill Dufris scrubbed, polished, and set music to Katherine’s narration. Charlesbridge kindly delivered Paige Keiser’s illustrations which laid down as sweetly as cupcakes on a peckish afternoon. A fine team effort for a fine picture book.
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To recreate the feel of the picture book She Loved Baseball: The Effa Manley Story, we brought in actor and narrator, Dion Graham. We knew Dion’s work from his Odyssey honored narration of the Negro Leagues book, We Are the Ship. Our sound producer, William Dufris wove jazz through Dion’s narration and hit ques in the script with baseball sound effects. Harpercollins delivered the art originals giving the trailer the full richness of Don Tate’s bold illustrations.
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For Sudipta Bardhan-Quallen’s picture book Quackenstein Hatches a Family elements of the book. We prepared the script and brought in the hilarious voice actor and audio producer, William Dufris to create the radio drama element. We then returned to a slightly serious tone with a tribute to zoos and zookeepers for protecting endangered animals by making all sorts of ‘mismatched’ families.
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For Sandra Dutton’s Mary Mae and the Gospel Truth we let music set the mood and the words of the script focus the viewer. The book is such a sweet balance of science and religion and of loyalty and exploration. I think we hit that balance with Sandra’s script and our photographs.
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For Kathleen T. Pelley’s picture book, Magnus Maximus, A Marvelous Measurer we wanted to capture the Victorian playfulness of the book (cue the background music) while delivering one particular serious message from the book –that we may over-quantify our lives and those of our children.
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For Erin Dionne’s novel, The Total Tragedy of a Girl Named Hamlet, we partnered with the incredible family that runs Shire Attire to portray the characters in the story.
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For Claudette Colvin: Twice Towards Justice by Phillip Hoose we wanted to capture the voice of living history, Claudette Colvin herself:
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For The Book of Tormod: A Templar’s Apprentice by Kat Black we wanted to evoke the haunting aspect of Kat’s setting and the promise of action to come:
