Chirenjenzie discussion

Hey there!
I'm currently working on making a book trailer for Asteria and found some interesting information that I thought I'd share. If you know of a cool site or some great tips, I'm sure we'd love to hear them! :-D

All righty,
First things first. All pictures and music must be either of your own making or in the public domain. For pictures, this usually involves either going to a public domain site or paying a small fee for the use of a photo. Music is a little more complicated.

All music before 1923 is not copyrighted. That great, isn't it? the problem is that the recording equipment wasn't exactly the best in the west back then, and so if you want to use Beethoven's ninth, that's fine as long as you have a 100 piece orchestra and a full chorus to perform it for you. All recorded music is copyrighted unless the performers/composers choose to put it in the public domain. This muddies the waters a bit.

If you come across a website that has public domain work please share. I'm combing through now and will put some more on in a bit, but here's what I have so far.

completely free domain photo site:
www.morguefile.com

Completely free domain music sites:
http://incompetech.com/m/c/royalty-fr...

http://www.musopen.org/?gclid=COyG1ZT...

Elizabeth wrote: "All righty,
First things first. All pictures and music must be either of your own making or in the public domain. For pictures, this usually involves either going to a public domain site or paying ..."

Chi ~ You can also use pics & music which have been published under a creative commons license. Creative Commons allows for the free sharing of artistic material and can be licensed for varying aspects, such as free to distribute, but not modify... free to distribute with modification, etc. Most request attribution - but if you give credits at the end, that takes care of it.

Also - for the music one approach a friend of mine took for her trailer was to seek out indie bands and found a young group on facebook with a song she thought was perfect for her trailer. She contacted them and they were delighted to let her have the rights to use it for her trailer.
You can also check into purchasing the rights to use the song through services like RumbleFish.

And for photos - you could do the same thing - search for amatuer photographers and request the rights to use their photo(s). It does take a lot of time slogging through material (one of the reasons I've never completed the trailer for my 2nd book.) And there are services which provide royalty free photos for a fee - dreamstime.com & iStockPhoto.com (dreamstime has a lot of the same photos as iStock & are usually cheaper.)

LK

I purchased a few photos from dreamstime, and you're right ... they are cheaper that iStockPhoto. I'm plugging away, but talk about eating TONS of time to do! Sheeesh!

Here is a royalty-free music clip site. I found this on Nathan Bransford's blog (was a guest post by someone else.) This is the site I used for my book trailer. :-)

http://incompetech.com/m/c/royalty-free/

Haha..Just looked back and realize you posted this one already! *blushes

I agree about all the royalty-free music sites (and good call on indie bands, LK!), but FWIW there's nothing like live action.

If you have a minicam and iMovie you might even be able to do it yourself. I've got a lot of excellent feedback on our trailers and trust me, they look more expensive than they really are. Most of the blood, sweat & tears is in hammering out and agreeing on the script.

So far I and my team have written and produced trailers for Pamela DuMond and JT Ellison. If you're interested, Pam and I co-blogged about the making of the trailer for Cupcakes, Lies And Dead Guys on March 22 & 23, over at http://workingstiffs.blogspot.com/2011_0...

It might give you some ideas.

In both cases they were fun experiences -- rewarding creatively and, as a scriptwriter, in the collaboration with real live working authors and novelists.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=el1U2f...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0BK3F...

Just in case you have been completely over run with my tweets about the trailer *drum roll!*
Here it is! :-D So excited! And thanks Pam Sims for all your hard work. YOU ROCK!!!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzvJu6...

This. Trailer. Is. FANTASTIC!!! When the music changes and it says, "But he's not who he appears to be," I got goose bumps!!!!!! Love it.

It truly was a labor of love. I picked out the music (which was a challenge to find copyright free snippets), but Pam Sims was the one who put the whole thing together. I just can't thank her enough!

I really enjoyed the trailer. Well done. One teensy comment though. You're missing two tags on the video - never forget to tag the video with the name of the book and the name of the author. We forget to tag that way because it is self-evident when watching the video, but search engines don't see it that way and the more tags you have with those two elements, the better chance you have of being found.

And I almost forgot to add, I post book trailers on my site (have been lagging on it for awhile, so decided to get yours up there) So it is now posted: http://www.griffieworld.com/2011/04/the-light-of-asteria-book-trailer/

Thanks so much LK! And I'll go back and tag away!