Creating a Book Trailer

The book I chose to use for the book trailer was Born on a Rotten Day by Hazel Dixon-Cooper. The book itself details all the terrible traits a person may have based upon their zodiac sign. The goal of my trailer was to shock and amuse the audience by using positive and negative comparisons for a sign while also having a cool picture representing the sign. Doing this in Animoto was both simple and fun. The music available seemed like a good fit for a zodiac book; the spiderweb theme added a bit of the dark feel I wanted for the audience. They get to discover their dark side if they read the book so a dark theme and music go great. While at first it was difficult to get the text character limit down, after the first couple pictures were added in this became easy. The preview option for the video was much appreciated as well. I will be adding Animoto to my professional toolkit for later use.

The other site I decided to try was Masher.com because I enjoyed the title to be honest. While it was easy enough to add content the options for themes were very limiting and even though there was a link to check for masher music to use in the video for free I could not actually get any music to come up. I found free music through the creative commons website and deliberately picked a 30 second clip to hopefully keep the video short but the video was 2 minutes instead. There was no way I could locate to limit the time an image was on screen or the length of the entire video. Also you are not able to add captions to the pictures which I disliked. There was no option for previewing the video before it was created either; another negative in my view. It also turned the image of the book cover from its original vertical position and wouldn't let me change it back. This was just frustrating. I don't think I will ever use this to make a book trailer again because it feels like a less functional PowerPoint slide show. This tool will not be going in my professional toolkit either.