I’ve been working on this since August and, recently, my agent gave me her blessing to post this publicly.
A short version of the trailer, for those who want to see things in under a minute and forty seconds, can be found here.
Speaking of my agent, I’ve missed “Unofficial Agent Appreciation Day”, but I do want to say that I appreciate my agent, a lot. The work she has already done with The Young City significantly improved my contract and her work on The Night Girl bodes well for the story. We’re shopping it around and there has been some interest, though with this now being the Christmas season, I doubt I’ll hear any more news from any publisher until after the New Year (that’s just the way the industry works).
And, speaking of, have you ever had good news which ruins your productivity? We had that sort of afternoon. Erin got news which we can’t tell you about for a little while, and I received a Readers’ Report from my agent about The Dream King’s Daughter. The reader — often someone with connections in the industry that my agent commissions to report on the quality of certain submissions — said wonderful things about the story, which makes me quite optimistic about its chances. And so I spent most of the afternoon, until suppertime, grinning like an idiot. So I really appreciate my agent right now.
Anyway, the book trailer above was created using Apple’s iMovie, using film clips that I downloaded (with permission) from YouTube. The music is a royalty-free version of Edvard Grieg’s In the Hall of the Mountain King; a piece suggested to me by Cameron. For many of the photographs and film clips, I went into Toronto early in September and snapped some photographs and shot some clips in and around Toronto’s PATH network, and in the Distillery District. My Canon digital camera was excellent for the capture of still pictures and film.
Apple’s iMovie was an interesting experience. On the plus side, the interface is so intuitive that I was able to create a draft version of the trailer in under two hours. It had a number of features that gave everything a professional look and it was, frankly, fun to use. On the minus side, the program is obviously buggy, with little glitches hampering my efforts to roll out this trailer. I expect, though, that Apple is working on these problems, and I hope that we’ll see improvements soon.
I’m quite happy with the book trailer, and hope you enjoy it as well. For those of you who are interested, I’ve posted the most recent draft of The Night Girl’s prologue and first chapter here.